Una Bala en Kuiper
2016 · 18m · España
Directed by Jorge Aguirre Pérez
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
On the remote planetoid Haumea, beyond the Kuiper Belt, four individuals dispute a mysterious briefcase and its contents through a game of Russian roulette.
Picked by Felix
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Russian roulette over a briefcase on a dwarf planet—it's absurd enough to work, and the fact that it actually *does* work makes it the kind of premise that makes you mad other people didn't think of it first. Genre-bending thriller-comedy that refuses to pick a lane and somehow lands all three.
Aguirre Pérez positions this in the lineage of Kubrick's detached sci-fi formalism and Tarantino's chamber-piece dialogue, though the absurdist escalation reads more undergraduate than fully realized—structurally sound, but the tonal ambitions outpace the execution.
The decision to play the entire escalation *straight*—no winking, no score, just the briefcase and four people in vacuum suits—is what sells the absurdity; lesser filmmakers would've underlined the joke, but this restraint makes the dark comedy land.