El buen mal
2014 · 10m · España
Directed by Jokin Urruticoechea
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, melancholic
He did not give it much importance, but then the symptoms sharpened; the doctors said there was no cure, he would follow sick the rest of his life — if only they had been right.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise flips the script so hard it breaks the script—a man *cursed* to survive his own terminal diagnosis, turned into a dark joke about medical certainty and the cruelty of wishful thinking. It's the kind of premise that makes you wince before you laugh, and nobody else would've greenlit it.
Urruticoechea situates this firmly in the lineage of European dark comedy—the formal restraint of the premise against the baroque weight of its irony recalls the tonal precision of Haneke or early Koreeda. The architecture of the twist demands rigorous control, and the film's economy suggests a director aware of what tradition demands.
The entire film hinges on a single withholding—the refusal to show us what "worse" looks like, keeping the camera's eye steady on the man's face as the world's pity becomes his prison. That one choice, that restraint, transforms a dark-comedy premise into something genuinely unsettling on almost nothing.