Joe is dead
2015 · 8m · España , Estados Unidos
Directed by Lucía Lubén
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Calvin wakes up to discover that his cat, Joe, has just died. While everyone seems to know what he should do with the body, Calvin, apparently indifferent, has little to say or do about it beyond walking around Los Angeles with Joe in a bag.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the grief beat, the moment Calvin breaks down or makes peace—and Lubén just refuses to give it to you, leaving Calvin's affect as a genuine void that makes you question what mourning even looks like. It's the kind of stubborn, uncomfortable refusal that lesser filmmakers would botch into pretension, but here it actually lands.
Lubén's restraint positions this squarely in the lineage of Buster Keaton's deadpan absurdism and contemporary slow-cinema's interrogation of emotional authenticity—the formal decision to withhold catharsis becomes the film's true argument about how we process loss.
The genius move is the bag itself: that single prop choice—keeping Joe visible but contained, neither buried nor properly mourned—does all the emotional and conceptual work, transforming what could've been a one-joke premise into something genuinely unsettling about avoidance and disconnection.