Dying of Laughter (4 Stars)

"Muertos de Risa" (engl. "Dying of laughter") is one of Alex de la Iglesia's sharpest and most uncomfortable black comedies; it takes the format of a Spanish TV comedy double act and slowly poisons it from the inside.

The film follows Nino and Bruno, two comedians whose career is built on mutual humiliation, timing and a very public sense of cruelty that the audience keeps rewarding. What starts as satire about celebrity culture and the mechanics of laughter gradually turns into something darker and more claustrophobic, as success hardens into obsession and dependency.

What makes it work is the tonal control. "Muertos de Risa" never fully lets you relax into either comedy or tragedy; it keeps slipping between the two, often in the same scene. The humour is real but it always feels a bit contaminated, like you’re laughing at something that’s already turning sour.

The film is also about Spain's own transformation. The older entertainment culture, shaped in the late Franco and immediate post-Franco years of the 1970's, relied on shared references, collective humour and a sense of social constraint. By the 1990's, that world has been replaced by aggressive media visibility, celebrity obsession and a television landscape that rewards extremity over subtlety. Nino and Bruno feel like products of that shift; they start in a world where performance is communal and end in one where it’s entirely predatory.

Alex de la Iglesia captures that transition with typical excess and discomfort. The film suggests that Spain’s move from a more contained, post-dictatorship culture into a modern media society didn't just change what people watched; it changed what they were willing to do to each other in public for attention.