Dieciocho
2016 · 8m · España
Directed by Tonet Ferrer
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
It is Jennifer's eighteenth birthday, with a menu of eye soup, fingers in sauce and fried knuckles, in a comedy adaptation of Jack the Ripper's daughter's birthday to our time and society.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Jack the Ripper's daughter turns 18 and gets served eye soup and fried knuckles—this is the kind of premise that makes you laugh-gasp because it shouldn't work, but Ferrer commits so hard to the absurdist logic that it actually does. Most scouts would've passed on something this provocatively unhinged; that's exactly why it's worth the slot.
Ferrer's adaptation mines a darkly comedic lineage stretching from Buñuel to contemporary horror-comedy, and the film's formal rigor—its measured pacing between grotesque imagery and deadpan absurdism—feels deliberately situated within that genealogy. The restraint of the filmmaking is what makes the premise sing rather than scream.
The real magic here is the tonal choice to play it all with such deadpan sincerity: the decision to treat a cannibalistic birthday party as a domestic comedy, complete with all the mundane rhythm and social awkwardness, transforms what could've been gratuitous into something genuinely unsettling and funny. That commitment to the wrong tone in the right way is everything.