This whimsical fable from Spanish writer-director Laura Mañà begins promisingly enough, when a wounded fugitive bank robber (Lluís Homar), carrying $1 million dollars in his bag, stumbles upon the remote village of San Hilario. The inhabitants, renowned for their abilities to stage lavish funerals, assume the newcomer is the wealthy artist German Cortes, who has already requested to be buried in their cemetery...
There is potential, then, for mordant black comedy – pitting the locals, with their expertise in all things death-related, against a criminal who’s on the run from the authorities. Yet despite its gallery of eccentric characters, To Die In San Hilario turns out to be a sluggishly-paced slice of saccharine magic realism, whose protagonist learns with tiresome predictability the values of embracing one’s inner child and learning to love life.
