O matachín (El matarife)
1996 · 16m · España
Directed by Jorge Coira
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Two small-time dealers, Fran and Tuto, collect Fran's girlfriend Lola at the airport; she has flown in from Venezuela carrying cocaine in her stomach, and just when everything seems to have gone well she falls ill and dies on the spot.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Coira takes the drug-mule premise—dead obvious territory—and strangles it into something genuinely uncomfortable: a 16-minute hostage situation where two small-time criminals have to figure out what to do with a corpse full of cocaine, and the dark comedy doesn't wink, it just *stays* there, breathing down your neck like they do.
A precise work of narrative economy that recalls the Spanish minimalist tradition; the film's refusal to sentimentalize Lola or resolve the ethical knot it creates sits in formal conversation with Haneke and early Erice, building dread through what it won't show rather than what it does.
The genius move is shooting almost the entire film in Fran's apartment—that constraint, that single location decision, turns what could be a lurid pulp moment into something claustrophobic and genuinely tragic, and the performances have nowhere to hide but the truth.