La buena muerte (Cristo de)
2015 · 12m · España
Directed by Suda Sánchez
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Ana is young but has burned all her hope with alcohol; with nothing to lose, she lets herself be drawn in by the first poor devil with a plan: profit by offering a sexual predator's head to one of his victims.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A burnt-out woman and a small-time hustler scheme to decapitate a predator for cash—it's a premise that shouldn't work, yet Sánchez plays it straight enough to make the absurdity razor-sharp, turning what could've been exploitation into something genuinely unsettling and darkly funny in ways mainstream cinema won't risk.
Sánchez situates this within a lineage of Latin American crime cinema that interrogates morality through desperation, though the tonal balance between dark comedy and genuine menace occasionally strains the formal architecture—the ambition is there, but the execution doesn't quite achieve the control of its influences.
The entire film turns on Ana's face in the moment she commits—a micro-decision where Sánchez holds on her long enough for us to see hope and horror occupy the same expression, and that single sustained beat reframes every cynical beat before it into something unexpectedly human.