La silla eléctrica
2019 · 17m · España
Directed by Joan Martín Giménez
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Julio finds a newspaper clipping telling how an American sentenced to die in the electric chair is pardoned after surviving two discharges. Impressed by such a feat, he embarks on a journey to prove that he too could survive it, and thus earn everyone's respect.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A protagonist chasing electrocution as the path to dignity—it's the kind of inverted logic that makes you wince and laugh simultaneously, and most scouts would've passed because it refuses to earn its absurdism the safe way. Giménez commits so fully to the surreal that it circles back around and becomes weirdly profound.
The film situates itself in a lineage of Spanish darkly comic storytelling, with formal restraint in its editing that lets the premise's grotesque logic unspool without commentary—there's a rigor here that distinguishes it from mere provocation.
The decision to play Julio's desperation straight, without winking at the camera, is what transforms the electric chair premise from gimmick into genuine pathos—that refusal to undercut the character is what makes the whole thing resonate instead of just shock.