The tiny village of San Hilario used to make its money by holding funerals as it was built around a cemetery, but for ten years business has been as quiet as the grave. However, the mayor, Mariano (Ulises Dumont) has received a letter from a dying artist who asks to be buried there because he only has days to live, and the village is filled with anticipation and excitement. San Hilario has no station, so they have to stand by the railway tracks with a sign to make clear where they are, but unfortunately the driver has never stopped there and isn't about to start now. As the train thunders past, the villagers watch it go in dismay, yet their spirits are lifted when they notice a man (Lluís Homar) sitting by the tracks - surely this must be the artist? Well, no... the artist has died on the train, and this man they find is an imposter. Not that he knows that himself.
Actress turned writer and director Laura Mañá staged a whimsical look at approaching death for To Die in San Hilario, or Morir en San Hilario to give the film its Spanish title. It seems to be set in a kind of limbo, with the village almost completely isolated from the outside world (we see a delivery truck visits the place, but that's about it), so the perfect area for the imposter to hide out. As we see over the opening credits, this man is really "Legs", a gangster who has stolen a huge amount of money from his boss's rivals and is on the run. At first he doesn't realise that the villagers are under the misapprehension that he's the artist, and gruffly plays along with their preparations, but when he cottons on that he might not be who they think he is, it puts him in a very difficult position, especially as the position they want to put him in is six feet under.
Despite its lovely cinematography and gently eccentric characters, To Die in San Hilario is not an easy film to warm to. There are a couple of reasons for this: the unsympathetic Legs apart, there's a whiff of desperation about the villagers that if offputting, and the whole plot is contrived and hard to believe in the first place as, for a start, Legs does not look like a dying man. By the time the story has transformed into a tale of redemption for its anti-hero, the sentimentality is laid on with a trowel, with a local widow (Ana Fernández), whose husband died in a flying accident, falling for Legs, as apparently she did with every dying man who arrived in the village. The cast are in the main middle aged or elderly, leaving a sense of a village on the verge of slow extinction: not the best atmosphere for a light hearted comedy, then. Finally, it's just not funny enough, and not moving enough either. An interesting failure, but no more than that. Music by Francesc Ganer.
