(2001, Spanish) Surrounded daily by terminally ill patients, most of whom become corpses, in a research hospital, Dr Faust (Miguel Ángel Solá)), an unmarried surgeon who has thus far dedicated his life to his work, arrives at the train terminal, from where he's to depart for a medical conference on terminal medicine, feeling anxious, helpless, and conflicted, with suicidal thoughts.

On the train he sits across the aisle from an elderly woman, who asks him to hold her suitcase while she goes to the bathroom. She doesn't come back; he gets off the train with her case to be greeted by Santos Vella (Eduard Fernández), pronounced with one "l" "like mozzarella," who claims to have been a former patient eight years earlier. Slick and cool, Santos explains that he'd had pancreatic cancer, requiring his entire stomach to be removed; Dr Faust had given him only three months to live.

Offering to be of help with favors - "I want to make you happy" - sending a young woman (saying she's a medical student working her way through college) to Faust's hotel room (later introduced as Santos's daughter Martita), Santos uncannily turns up time after time.

In the conference Dr Faust reports on his work -"Illness is a clumsy criminal" - with a gruesome video of surgery on a cadaver. Unable to accept that a man without his stomach could have survived and thrived, looking as healthy as Santos, Faust calls his attractive assistant Julia (Najwa Nimri)), with whom he's had a strictly professional relationship for ten years, to look into past medical records for the supposed patient.

A psycho-horror drama in which screenwriter Fernando León de Aranoa inverts the traditional story of Dr Faust, co-directors Álex Ollé and Isidro Ortiz with the Spanish theatre troupe La Fura de Babus send us careening through the corridors of confusion, emptying onto a seemingly enigmatic ending.

Startled by the appearance of a woman he recognizes in the audience, Faust follows her onto the street and into a bar where she's seated at a table with Santos, who cautions the doctor to be careful of what he wishes for. Julia excitedly calls about Renol, a patient expected to die: "It's the most amazing recovery I've ever seen."

While Santos drives Faust to what he's been led to believe is the genie's house, Vella, tossing out the window the report Julia had prepared and instructing his passenger to ask personally if he wants to know anything, tells Faust that he may have "Your best wish" and that he will remain in close company until "all of them" are granted. Faust tells Santos his foremost wish is for "someone to take care of Julia." Repeatedly tempted, Faust eventually behaves abnormally, doing things he wouldn't have done before, though with Santos there are consequences.

In a lavatory of a wild nightclub after drinking heavily, Faust encounters a girl, Margarita (Raquel González), of whom Santos had asked him earlier, "You want her?" After Faust briefly explains to her his strange situation, she asks him if all of his wishes must be granted: "The evil ones, too?"

Santos sends the physician through a nightmare in hell. "Is there anyway to stop this?" Faust implores. Of course, there's one way out, requiring a signature on a death certificate.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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