It was a dark and stormy night
A bunch of strangers seek shelter at a dimly lit funeral parlor
In Pablo Bucca’s gripping thriller Una mujer sucede (2005), a handful of perfect strangers – three middle-aged men with no apparent connection – converge on a small-town funeral parlor where the wake for an unidentified woman is being held. As befits a darkly ominous noirish nouvelle, a storm is raging and the dimly lit, damp funeral home is the only available refuge given the time of night, the weather conditions and some comically twisted incidents involving townsfolk short on patience.
A minor digression: if you’re a fan of cartoonist Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, you will probably recall that Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s adorable beagle pet, had literary ambitions that always, inevitably, ran short. Perched on top of his dog house, he would start, over and over, to type a mystery novel. “It was a dark and stormy night” was as far as he would always get.
