Con la muerte en los tacones
2007 · 10m · España
Directed by David Díaz
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Dani is in love with Silvia and, instead of telling her, decides to hypnotise her; in full trance he abandons her after saying 'You will only desire to give me…', just as his mates walk in saying '…the biggest beating of your life'.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A hypnosis-meet-cute that yanks the rug out mid-confession—the joke lives in that unfinished sentence, where romantic vulnerability gets sandbagged by male friendship brutality. It's the kind of premise that sounds like a setup for sentimentality until it isn't, and most scouts would miss why that matters.
Structurally, the film executes a clean three-beat reversal (setup, trance, sabotage) that recalls the precision of classical farce, though the Spanish dark comedy tradition—Álex de la Iglesia's DNA, perhaps—gives it an edge other regional comedies might soften.
The entire film hinges on that single interrupted line: the moment the hypnotic suggestion fractures, everything we thought we understood about Dani's intentions collapses, and it's a credit to Díaz's restraint that he lets the cut and the timing of the friends' entrance do all the heavy lifting.