El último inquilino
2018 · 16m · República Dominicana
Directed by Cassandro Fortuna
Genres: drama, fantasy, mystery
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A terminally ill Argentine travelling in Cuba is referred to a healer across the Haitian border; after drinking a brew and receiving a multicoloured collar in a ceremony, he wakes back in his hotel convinced it was a nightmare — until the collar appears in his backpack.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dying man gets magic'd by a Haitian healer, wakes up unsure if it happened, and—plot twist—the collar proves it did; most scouts would've turned this into earnest magical realism, but Fortuna's leaving it genuinely *unresolved*, and that ambiguity is where the real subversion lives.
The film positions itself within a lineage of Latin American magical realism while maintaining formal restraint—the collar functions as both McGuffin and memento mori, grounding the surreal within a disciplined narrative structure that recalls the rigorous dreamlogic of Buñuel.
The single choice that detonates everything: that moment when he opens his backpack and the collar is *actually there*—Fortuna holds on that beat just long enough that you feel the ontological ground shift, and that restrain turns a neat premise into something that sticks in your chest.