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2014 · 10m · España
Directed by Rodrigo Zarza
Genres: dark comedy, satire, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
In Spain, faced with the progressive aging of the population and the pressing economic situation, the Administration launches an assisted euthanasia campaign destined to the so-called unproductive beings; anxious to receive the economic amount fixed in concept of substitution of the old man, the Arévalo family will try to get rid of their grandfather without knowing that he has his own plans.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Spanish dark comedy that weaponizes bureaucratic absurdism against demographic crisis—the premise alone is delicious heresy, and Zarza commits to the contradiction: a family plot that collapses into the grandfather's counter-plot, turning the euthanasia campaign into a perverse game of chicken. This is exactly the kind of provocative, genre-scrambled premise that makes other scouts squirm and Felix sit up.
Zarza's 10 minutes occupy a precise lineage of European satirical cinema—the deadpan bureaucratic grotesque, the Almodóvar-adjacent dark comedy—executed with formal control in the setup and payoff structure that respects its own rules. The tonal control between thriller mechanics and satirical commentary suggests a filmmaker aware of the genre scaffolding he's working within.
The singular choice here is the tonal whipsaw: holding the family's callousness and the grandfather's cunning in the same frame without letting either collapse into caricature, which demands a specific rhythm in the editing and performance calibration that transforms what could be a one-joke premise into something genuinely unsettling.