Velatorio (Barroco)
2016 · 10m · España
Directed by Aitor de Miguel
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, theatrical
Ricardo must confess before his dead girlfriend, just as he promised, at a baroque wake where almost nothing is what it seems.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A dead girlfriend, a forced confession, a wake where nothing tracks—this should be maudlin garbage, but de Miguel yanks the emotional rug and replaces it with baroque theatrical absurdism that actually *works* as dark comedy instead of trying too hard.
Velatorio sits at the exact intersection of surrealist cinema and memento mori tradition, where formal control—the layered staging, the tonal calibration between confession and farce—proves that constraint breeds invention; this is a film aware of its own artifice in the best sense.
The choice to stage this confession in a baroque theatrical space rather than play it straight transforms what could be melodrama into something genuinely strange; that single decision to lean into artifice over naturalism is what lifts the whole piece.