Ridiculus Mortis: Sólo la muerte se flipa 2 veces
2007 · 20m · España
Directed by David Díaz
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Jaime suffers a clumsy fatal accident, slipping in the lift and stabbing the pen in his jacket into his neck; when Death comes for him, Jaime demands to speak to God to clear up this 'misunderstanding'.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2007 Spanish short that treats death like a customer service complaint — absurdist enough to dodge the obvious, weird enough to actually work, and completely unbothered by whether anyone else thinks a pen-in-the-neck premise is funny (it is). This is the kind of film that makes you realize 'dark comedy' is usually a euphemism for safe irony, and then this one shows up and means it.
Díaz inherits a lineage of philosophical comedy — the Méliès-to-Roeg tradition of death as bureaucrat — but the execution feels more sketch than formal argument; the whimsy occasionally swallows the rigor needed to make the metaphysical premise land with weight rather than wink.
The whole film hinge on that single absurd moment of bureaucratic Death getting caught in Jaime's logic, and the decision to play it straight — no mugging, no editorial wink — is what transforms a one-note premise into something that actually breathes across 20 minutes on a clear budget.