Cotard
2018 · 7m · España
Directed by Rubén Torresano
A sufferer of Cotard syndrome is convinced that he is already dead, his organs rotting, or that he simply does not exist.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Cotard is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable — a medical horror that takes a real neurological condition and doesn't flinch from its absurdist, darkly funny implications. Most scouts would hedge into psychological thriller territory; Torresano commits fully to the surreal logic of believing you're already dead, and that's where the film gets genuinely disorienting.
Torresano's formal approach to rendering delusion — the precise visual language he builds to make the impossible feel inevitable — places this firmly in the lineage of body-horror cinema that takes its condition seriously, recalling the structuralist rigor of early Cronenberg without the exploitation.
The film's entire power hinges on a single formal choice: the decision to never show us a "normal" version of the protagonist's reality, so we're trapped in his perceptual frame from frame one, which transforms a seven-minute runtime into something claustrophobic and genuinely unsettling on a microbudget.