Una cuchara
2016 · 9m · España
Directed by Teo Estrela
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
A killer who sees himself as a great artist kidnaps a Mormon preacher and a pizza delivery man to demonstrate the nature of his art, insisting anything — chopsticks, a blender, a doormat — can kill.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A killer-as-artist premise that could've been pretentious garbage becomes genuinely subversive by treating the absurdist logic dead seriously—chopsticks, a doormat, a blender—and letting the Mormon preacher and pizza guy become unwilling philosophers in a dark comedy that refuses to signal its own cleverness.
Estrela demonstrates formal control in how the film sustains tension across its escalating demonstrations, situating itself at the intersection of Buñuelian absurdism and crime thriller tradecraft, though the conceptual framework occasionally overwhelms the compositional rigor that could elevate it beyond provocation.
The entire film hinges on the casting choice to play the killer's monologues straight—no winking, no camp—which transforms what could be arch commentary into genuinely unsettling dark comedy, and that commitment to tonal consistency across nine minutes on what looks like a modest budget is what makes the premise land.