El último mar
2022 · 13m · España
Directed by Jose Maria Tros de ilarduya
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A homeless man is kidnapped by a being that dwells beneath the sea and is entrusted with a mission to improve the life of the being, its family, and all of humanity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sea-dwelling creature enlists a homeless man to save humanity—it's genuinely unhinged premise work that most festivals would reflexively reject, and Tros de Ilarduya commits to the weirdness without winking, which is exactly why it lands.
The film carries a lineage of mythic cinema—echoes of Pasolini's treatment of the sacred and profane—and its formal restraint in the face of surreal material demonstrates considerable discipline; the contemplative pacing earns its mythological weight.
What arrests you is the choice to play this entirely straight: no irony, no scale inflation, just a quiet performance against the impossible, and that tonal commitment—treating the absurd as already sacred—is what transforms a premise into something that actually breathes.