La terapia de Víctor
2014 · 18m · España
Directed by Carlos de Cozar
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: absurdist, dark, provocative
This is the story of seven suicides who attend a meeting organized by a mysterious host who offers them the use of 'Nemesis', a machine that provides a quick and painless death; however, only one of them will have the privilege of using it, and they will have to argue their reasons to the others and be put to a vote.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A death lottery masquerading as group therapy—this is exactly the kind of premise that makes everyone else nervous and makes me pay attention. De Cozar takes a concept that should be repellent and wrings absurdist dark comedy from it, subverting every expectation about what a 'suicide film' is supposed to do.
The formal rigor here is in the constraint itself: a single location, a vote mechanism, escalating philosophical argument standing in for plot. It sits somewhere between Buñuel's satirical logic and contemporary chamber-piece cinema, aware of its own structural elegance.
The voting mechanism isn't just the plot—it's the engine that forces each character into a specific behavioral choice, and that single structural decision transforms what could be a heavy-handed concept into something that actually breathes and reveals character through desperate rhetoric.