La última voluntad de Emilio Cancela
2015 · 9m · España
Directed by David Caiña
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
Emilio Cancela has decided to kill himself and claims his condemned man's last wish — a cigarette and a coffee with ice — unaware he will know hell before dying, and that his hell has no fire.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A suicide narrative that doesn't wallow—instead it inverts the whole terminal-wish trope into a surreal punishment that's almost funny, which is exactly the kind of genre sabotage that makes everyone else uncomfortable and makes you wonder why nobody tried it before.
Caiña situates this in a lineage of magical-realist fables and existential Spanish cinema, executing the tonal shifts with precise formal control—the coffee-and-cigarette ritual becomes both absurdist ceremony and genuine pathos through disciplined mise-en-scène.
The decision to make hell mundane rather than spectacular—no fire, just the crushing weight of ordinary consequence—reframes a $0-budget concept into something that lands with the force of a much larger production, all on the strength of that single tonal choice.