El guía
2020 · 21m · Argentina
Directed by Alejandro Luna
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
A guide whose job is to collect souls and take them to the afterlife spends a working day picking up three souls, indulging his habit of granting wishes to make their rest a little easier.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Death-as-bureaucrat is played so straight and tender that it almost becomes sentimental—which is exactly why it works as subversion; Luna refuses the easy cynicism and makes the gimmick *feel* instead.
A formally composed meditation on mercy disguised as a job, where every scene's geometry—the guide's patient movements, the three encounters stacked like a triptych—recalls the structuring intelligence of ghost stories from Koreeda to Ocelot.
The film hinges on Luna's choice to keep the guide's face and reactions minimal, letting the weight of each wish-granting live entirely in silence and gesture; it's a performance of restraint that transforms 21 minutes into something elegiac.