Ayer o anteayer
2017 · 9m · España
Directed by Hugo Sanz
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A hearse circulates along secondary roads. Two sisters occupy the driver's and passenger's seats; in the back they carry a coffin. The last time they saw each other they ended up very angry after a tremendous argument, and this funeral journey will serve both as catharsis, though for each sister in a very different way.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two sisters in a hearse sounds like a premise everyone else would soften into sentimentality, but Sanz lets the dark comedy and unresolved anger breathe—it's a genuinely uncomfortable intimacy that refuses cheap catharsis, which is exactly the kind of tonal tightrope most filmmakers botch.
The confined geography of the hearse becomes a formal constraint that echoes the road-movie tradition while subverting it; what emerges is a study in how spatial and temporal closure can hold grief and resentment in productive tension, the kind of economical storytelling that rewards close viewing.
The decision to keep both sisters visible—driver and passenger, neither centered—creates an asymmetry of attention that mirrors their unequal emotional processing; that small blocking choice does the entire emotional work of the film without a single expository line.