Hasta la muerte
2004 · 9m · España
Directed by Juan Pérez Fajardo
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, western
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
In an old Western saloon every day seems the same — cowboys get drunk, mariachis play the same melody, soldiers fight an endless fight — until one day a new corpse is buried in the cemetery and its skeleton arrives at the Infernal Saloon.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A skeleton literally walks into a saloon where time has stopped and nothing matters — it's gloriously unhinged, the kind of premise that makes you wonder why nobody else thought to marry Western iconography with Mexican folklore via Sisyphean horror-comedy, and Fajardo commits to the bit without winking.
The formal conceit—a cyclical purgatorial space where the mise-en-scène repeats until death arrives to break the loop—feels indebted to both Buñuel's absurdism and the visual grammar of classical Westerns, though the execution leans more toward conceptual elegance than sustained formal investigation.
The decision to keep the skeleton's arrival matter-of-fact, almost bureaucratic, rather than melodramatic is what makes this work; that tonal restraint in a 9-minute film with a literally impossible premise is the lift that transforms it from clever into haunting.