Yo, Monstruo. Cortometraje español de Paco Ruiz Domínguez
2019 · 15m · España
Directed by Paco Ruiz Domínguez
Genres: dark comedy, drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, theatrical
This is the story of a monster who is not a monster: a method actor who has played every imaginable creature across more than fifty films now gives testimony about his craft during the shoot of an American production.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A method actor's soliloquy about becoming monsters sounds like the kind of self-serious essay film that usually puts me to sleep—except Ruiz Domínguez actually weaponizes the pretension, turning the whole thing into a dark joke about artistic delusion that most festivals would be too earnest to touch.
The film's real sophistication lies in how it positions itself within the essay tradition while maintaining formal rigor: a performative testimony that collapses the boundary between actor and creature, cinema and confession, with the precision of a director fully aware he's working in a lineage stretching back to Godard and beyond.
What makes this work is the decision to let the actor's voice carry the entire weight—no explanatory editing, no montage shortcuts—just a performer's sustained monologue that transforms the intimate space of testimony into something almost unbearably theatrical, and that singular commitment to restraint is everything.