El día que decidí matarme
2011 · 20m · España
Directed by Salvador Guerra
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Emilio, almost forty and lost while working for an insurance company despite dreaming of writing, uses weekly therapy to confront a conflictive relationship with his father and decides to give his life a drastic turn.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Title promises a suicide note but delivers a therapy-session character study—a bait-and-switch that could've been bold, except Guerra plays it straight, all melancholy and self-aware regret with zero teeth.
Guerra's formal restraint—holding Emilio in the sterile frame of the insurance office and therapy room, letting mise-en-scène do the work of entrapment—shows real lineage to European introspective cinema, a considered architecture of stasis that earns its quiet devastation.
The decision to anchor the entire emotional arc in the recurring gesture of Emilio's hand—the way he touches his face during breakthroughs in therapy—becomes the film's emotional weather system, transforming a potentially generic midlife-crisis premise into something felt rather than explained.