Artificial
2015 · 20m · España
Directed by David Pérez Sañudo
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Xabier goes to a job interview without knowing he has already been selected: CORPSA offers him 80,000 euros in exchange for letting himself be cloned, and his decision will affect many things and many euros.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that actually *inverts* the usual bioethics sermon—instead of the clone horror story, we get a bewildered everyman negotiating his own obsolescence like a real estate deal, and the absurdist twist lands harder than any earnest sci-fi lecture could. This is the kind of subversive dark comedy that makes you uncomfortable exactly where it should, which means most festival programmers will sleep on it.
Pérez Sañudo situates this squarely in the lineage of European social satire—Tati's bureaucratic comedy DNA runs through the interview scenes—while the sci-fi conceit functions as a formal constraint rather than spectacle, which disciplines the filmmaking in ways that deserve close attention.
The film's entire engine turns on one decision: playing the interview itself *completely straight*, letting the horror and comedy emerge entirely from what the protagonist is being offered rather than from any directorial winking—that restraint, that trust in the premise, is what lifts it from concept to actual cinema.