El señor Puppe
2007 · 16m · España
Directed by Carlos Crespo
Genres: dark comedy, drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Narciso and his ventriloquist's dummy, Mr. Puppe, survive in the misery of old decaying artists; loneliness takes over their lives and the fragile line between reality and sanity fades until it is unclear which of the two is the ventriloquist and which the puppet.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A ventriloquist's dummy that might be the only sane one in the room—Crespo flips the puppet-master premise inside out and lets it rot in real time, which is exactly the kind of perverse inversion most scouts would nervously pass on.
The film situates itself within a lineage of identity-dissolution cinema, yet the formal restraint—letting ambiguity fester rather than resolve—demonstrates a considered hand aware of its debts to Buñuel and early Kaufman.
The decision to shoot the dummy with the same flat, unflinching intimacy as the man—no heightened focus pulls, no visual hierarchy—quietly dismantles which character we're supposed to root for, and that choice does all the psychological work.