Planeta azúcar. Cortometraje español de David Salvochea
2017 · 12m · España
Directed by David Salvochea
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
Luis leads an apparently normal life until one morning, in a café, he receives an unexpected visit from someone who until then had been invisible and who will accompany him for the rest of his life: his sugar.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man gets haunted by his own sugar—not a metaphor, an actual character—and somehow this absurdist riff on addiction and invisible complicity lands harder than a hundred sincere indie dramadies about consequence. Salvochea's doing exactly what boring people fear: making you laugh while the metaphor eats you alive.
The film positions itself cleverly within a lineage of Spanish surrealist satire, using personification as formal constraint rather than gimmick, though the execution occasionally indulges its own cleverness at the expense of disciplined pacing.
That decision to make the Sugar a fully present, conversational character rather than a voice-over or invisible force is what transforms this from concept into cinema—it forces every scene to negotiate the absurd literally, and Salvochea commits to it completely without winking.