La última voluntad de don Gervasio o los títeres de la muerte
2009 · 15m · España
Directed by Sonia Madrid
Genres: comedy, fantasy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
Almost a hundred years old, Don Gervasio astonishes everyone around him with an unusual resolve: his last will is so firm that nothing can change it — or maybe it can.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 15-minute Spanish puppet-death-will film from 2009 that nobody's heard of — exactly the kind of premise that makes you wonder why it isn't in every anthology. Madrid's refusal to let the premise settle into either comedy or dread is the whole point, and it works precisely because it shouldn't.
The film's formal restraint in handling its surrealist conceit shows a considered hand; there's lineage here to Buñuel's deadpan grotesque, though the execution occasionally favors whimsy over the rigor that would elevate it into genuine discourse.
What hooks this is the puppetry choice itself — using marionettes to literalize the loss of agency in Don Gervasio's final act transforms a simple premise into something genuinely unsettling, and Madrid commits to it without winking at the audience.