El escarabajo al final de la calle
2017 · 18m · España
Directed by Joan Vives
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, melancholic, surreal
Amadeo lives in a quiet Valencian town and, since the death of a wife, devotes body and soul to caring for an invalid father-in-law, Mr Agustin. Lolin, the fishmonger's daughter, decapitates an eel and foresees that Amadeo has seven days left to live.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A fishmonger's daughter reads death in a decapitated eel, and somehow that's not the weird part—it's the most natural thing in a film that treats grief and prophecy like neighbors in a quiet Spanish street. Vives has made something that refuses to pick a lane, and that's exactly why it works.
The tonal architecture here is deliberately unsettled, oscillating between intimate domestic realism and folkloric surrealism in ways that echo the Spanish fantastical tradition; the editing restraint—letting scenes breathe before cutting to the next small apocalypse—suggests a filmmaker in conversation with a specific lineage.
The decision to play the eel prophecy completely straight, without winking or irony, is what makes this breathe: Vives trusts the absurdist premise enough to let Amadeo's quotidian caregiving and his impending doom occupy the same emotional space, and that commitment sells the whole delicate structure.