Jugando con la muerte
2010 · 18m · España
Directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
Grandfather Eusebio is ill and becoming a burden; his family thinks him senile and disbelieves his incredible tales, until one night Death shows up at his home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Death as a house guest is a premise everyone's half-thought, but Alijo doesn't wink at the camera—he lets the surrealism sit beside the domestic dread without irony, which is exactly the move most filmmakers are too cowardly to commit to.
A formally precise negotiation between the melodrama of aging and the allegorical weight of Death's arrival; the film knows its debts to magical realism and Spanish regional cinema, and it honors them through restraint rather than flourish.
The decision to play Eusebio's unreliability straight—never cutting away to confirm or deny his stories—transforms what could be sentimental into something genuinely uncanny, and that single tonal commitment is what makes an 18-minute sketch feel complete.