CONDOLENC-IAS
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Rubén Bautista
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Richi turns to an artificial intelligence to produce a sincere condolence message for a friend's bereaved family, but simulating his scarce empathy proves harder than expected.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that sounds like a greeting card commercial until it isn't—watching an algorithm fail to manufacture empathy because the human feeding it has none to begin with is genuinely perverse in the best way, and Bautista lets that contradiction breathe without winking at the audience.
Bautista positions this squarely in the lineage of tech-as-mirror satire, but what elevates it beyond commentary is the restraint in the editing and the refusal to overstate the joke; the three-minute duration becomes structural necessity, not a constraint.
The singular choice here is making the AI *competent*—it does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is precisely why the film breaks—and that decision transforms a one-liner premise into something that actually examines what we're asking algorithms to do when we can't do it ourselves.