Healing
2020 · 12m
Directed by Adrian Perez
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
Sarah wants to put a stop to Ben's work as a faith healer and secretly documents his dubious methods; when Ben finds out, he pushes her into an abyss and sinks her body in a mountain lake — and discovers that miracles actually happen.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A faith healer who commits murder gets rewarded with actual miracles—the premise alone is so gleefully, unapologetically backwards that most scouts would've already rejected it, and that's exactly why it works. Perez takes the con-artist thriller and flips it inside out into something genuinely subversive, where the moral order doesn't just invert, it dissolves.
The tonal balance between thriller and dark comedy is executed with considerable precision, and Perez demonstrates formal control in how the film sustains the genre collision without collapsing into pastiche. It's a confident piece of craft that knows exactly what tradition it's playing against.
The pivot at the lake—when the film stops pretending to be a revenge narrative and Ben's punishment becomes his salvation—hinges entirely on a single tonal shift that could've felt cheap but instead lands because Perez commits fully to the surreal logic, making miracle-as-consequence feel earned rather than gimmicky.