Amargo era el postre
2019 · 20m · España
Directed by Diego H. Kataryniuk Di Costanzo
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, tense, theatrical
Marc Eilts is a French nobleman who invites his friends to dinner — the first dinner after the death of his wife. Everything proceeds with maximum tranquillity until a peculiar dessert and a macabre game jeopardise the French nobility.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A dinner-party thriller that checks all the expected boxes—death, secrets, a game that spirals—until it doesn't; the macabre dessert premise promises subversion but mostly delivers theatrical competence, which is exactly the kind of film that makes Felix restless.
Kataryniuk Di Costanzo orchestrates a formally precise chamber piece that recalls the claustrophobic salon traditions of European cinema, where restraint and the architecture of conversation become the grammar of dread—the kind of considered mise-en-scène that programs itself into retrospectives.
The specificity lives in the dessert itself as both plot mechanism and visual motif: whatever that peculiar confection is, it becomes the hinge on which tone shifts from drawing-room civility to genuine threat, and that single object choice—deployed with restraint—transforms what could've been generic into something that breathes.