Cuchillo, McGregor y el Vasco
2009 · 14m · España
Directed by David Zabala, Paul Urkijo Alijo
Genres: adventure, crime, western
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Bandit Cuchillo is pursued by a bounty hunter towards the Mexican border through a desert where strange things happen; in his flight he meets Patxi, a Basque shepherd, with whom he must face the feared bounty hunter McGregor.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Basque shepherd materializing in a Mexican desert western—this is the kind of premise that makes you laugh and then realize it's not a joke, and the film knows exactly how unhinged it is. The surreal logic of it works precisely because the directors commit to the absurdity without winking, which is why every other scout probably passed on it.
The film sits uneasily between genre homage and deconstruction, mixing spaghetti western iconography with folklore that doesn't belong to it; the formal tension is interesting, though the execution occasionally prioritizes oddness over the clarity of spatial or narrative craft.
What sells this isn't the premise—it's the decision to play it completely straight, letting the tonal whiplash between desert noir and pastoral surrealism come from performance and editing rhythm rather than exposition or irony, which is exactly how you make a 14-minute film punch above its weight.