The Fantastic Golem Affairs 2023

Two friends on a rooftop turn a lighthearted game into a strange, fatal-nightmare: they try to guess movies, looping through rounds like The Shining and Alive, until in the third round one of them strips down, imitates a monkey, and plummets off the edge, shattering onto a car. The survivor, Juan Martínez, watches the chaos unfold and then attends the funeral of the shattered man, David, alongside his own father and a woman who works for him, Clara. The scene quickly shifts from grief to a surreal curiosity about fate and responsibility, as the living man navigates a world where a single accident can set off a long chain of unraveling secrets.

Left alone with the weight of what happened, Juan is handed a bill for the funerary services and finds himself testifying to a pair of police officers about the bizarre incident. He returns to bed and starts posting on social media, asking if anyone else has endured something similar—best friends shattered into pieces as a grotesque accident of fate. The next morning brings an unexpected visitor: an insurance rep who tells him that he is somehow responsible for the damage to the vehicle onto which the other man fell.

An online reply from a woman named Maria Pons offers a share of recognition, claiming she has witnessed a similar “shattering” in her own life, prompting Juan to seek out Filtro, a friend of the deceased. A tense exchange with Filtro reveals that David’s possessions are now legally tied to Juan, a twist that deepens the mystery surrounding the dead man’s world. At the same time, Juan’s father and Clara visit the DEP offices, where attendees are told that a flawed “death algorithm” has begun to assign the same fate to everyone—a chilling, almost mechanical inevitability described as a piano-crushing death.

As Juan’s life becomes increasingly entangled with Maria, he embarks on a relationship with her, and she recounts another haunting tale about a stepfather who suffered a similar “shattering hand.” But their moment of connection is interrupted when two men posing as police agents spy on him; the encounter culminates in an assault on his apartment, and Juan ends up injuring Roger while Carlos escapes with minor injuries. He then drags an unconscious Carlos to the offices of Golem Solutions S.L. in Madrid, where a company official—Carlos’s father—reveals that their business specializes in building life-like golems, and that the David who shattered earlier was in fact a golem commissioned by Juan’s father. The official dies in a piano-crushing accident, leaving Juan and Clara to confront the tangled family and corporate loyalties that created such a broken world.

Clara, now deeply involved with the golem-factory empire, asks Juan to speak to his father. In a candid confession, Toni explains that he commissioned David for Juan when he was a child because he thought Juan was something of a complete duffer, and he lays out a chilling tradition: Juan must confront his own father and right the legacy he has inherited. The revelation shifts the stakes from personal guilt to a planned, almost ritualized succession, as Juan contemplates recreating David with Clara’s help. A fragile alliance forms between Juan, Clara, and the staff at DEP, and the plan involves dividing David’s inheritance, reconfiguring the board of DEP, and bringing Carlos into a new role at Golem Solutions, with the aim of producing another David.

The journey continues with encounters aboard a train to Zaragoza, where the old family power and the new corporate machine collide. Toni’s death—swift, almost ceremonial, and carried out by throat slicing—marks a grim turning point, and the survivors converge again at the funeral of Juan’s father, [Toni], where the lines between affection, obligation, and murder blur. In the end, the film traces a disturbing loop: a life shaped by manufactured substitutes and calculated fates, where friendship, love, and loyalty are constantly redefined by the very machinery that was built to serve them. The result is a meditation on what it means to be human when the boundaries between creator and creature, heir and instrument, become dangerously indistinct.