En la otra camilla
2008 · 21m · España
Directed by Luis Melgar
Genres: comedy, crime, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, dark, darkly comic
Two kidnappers holding an elderly businessman for ransom reach three months of captivity when he cuts his own neck with a razor during a lapse. They are forced to take him to a hospital.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A kidnapping where the hostage becomes the problem—the subversive genius here is that the captors' desperation and dark pragmatism gets funnier and more human the longer you sit with it, which is exactly the kind of genre inversion that makes everyone else uncomfortable and makes me want to program it twice.
Melgar's restraint in the mise-en-scène—the waiting, the mundane horror of extended captivity—situates this firmly in a lineage of moral-comedies that trace back to Haneke and the Dardenne brothers, where formal discipline transforms genre pulp into something genuinely considered.
The film's entire architecture hangs on that single act of self-harm: the moment the power dynamic inverts and the kidnappers become caretakers, and Melgar trusts that one decision to do all the narrative and tonal work, refusing to oversell the absurdity with anything else.