MATEO
2019 · 3m · Mexico
Directed by Fernando Perezgil
Genres: dark comedy, horror, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Mateo, a former self-service store employee turned zombie, wanders a post-apocalyptic world with his consciousness and memories intact, unable to share the deep thoughts about the meaning of life he has formed.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Zombie-with-existential-dread is precisely the kind of premise everyone's seen before, so I respect Perezgil for swinging at it anyway—but the film doesn't quite stick the landing hard enough to feel genuinely subversive, just wistful.
A cleanly executed riff on the zombie-consciousness conceit with formal restraint; the melancholy registers, though it sits comfortably within genre tradition rather than interrogating it.
That three-minute runtime could've collapsed this whole concept, but Perezgil's choice to let silence and Mateo's mundane wandering do the heavy lifting—no exposition dump, just a thinking corpse moving through emptiness—transforms a thin premise into something genuinely haunting.