Hábitos
1995 · 8m · España
Directed by Juan Flahn
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Adelina Llongueras, a devout and upright woman in love with her parish's young priest, cannot bear the other parishioners confessing to him or taking communion from his hands, but she is resourceful and knows how not to suffer too much.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman so consumed by jealousy of her priest that she methodically poisons the communion wafers—it's Vatican noir played for laughs, the kind of premise that makes you wince and cackle simultaneously, and most scouts would've passed it off as too arch, which is exactly why it's perfect.
Flahn's 1995 short sits in a lineage of Spanish-language satire that weaponizes Catholic kitsch, and the restraint of the editing—letting the horror of Adelina's petty sabotage unfold in intimate close-ups—gives the dark comedy a formal precision that elevates it beyond mere provocation.
The revelation lands entirely on Llongueras's face—that moment when we clock that this woman isn't troubled or desperate, but *decisive*, almost cheerful in her sociopathy—and that single tonal pivot from drama into absurdist comedy is what makes eight minutes feel like a complete moral argument.