Halley

What does it really mean to be alive when you’re already dead inside?

I’d had "Halley" on my list since it came out in 2012, but back then wasn’t the right time.

I was grieving—seeing firsthand what a body in decay truly looks like. And let me tell you, it’s anything but cinematic.

It’s terrifying. It exposes how fragile we are—how illness strips away our dignity piece by piece.

That experience changed my perception of life and time. It left me with a kind of rot-phobia that still haunts my dreams, waking me in tears some nights.

But finally, I decided it was time to watch it. Perhaps not the right time again—but certainly the necessary one.

We enter the film with Alberto (Alberto Trujillo), a man visibly ill yet unable to explain his condition to his boss. He’s forced to leave his job to take care of himself.

In the opening minutes—set entirely in a gym, that ironic temple of health and vitality—the contrast between decay and wellness immediately roots the story in something deeply unsettling and disturbingly real.

The mind makes the body ill—watching, feeling, every fibre of your flesh and skin slowly fall into disrepair. "Halley" (2012), directed by Sebastián Hofmann, confronts this dilemma with a quiet, unnerving beauty.

It’s a slow burn of burnout, portrayed in one of the most hauntingly authentic ways possible. Not for everyone…because it captures, almost too perfectly, the loneliness of our time.

Hofmann uses natural light to give the film a fever-dream quality—like the blinding glow people claim to see in that brief moment between life and death.

The insects become the closest thing to the body returning to the earth, reconnecting with the Mother—but there’s nothing poetic about it. It’s pure melancholy and despair, like living inside a body that’s collapsing in on itself, unable to feel pleasure or relief, trapped in exhaustion.

The entire film feels like a hospital you know you’ll never leave alive: the workplace, the underground, the passive faces surrounding us. It’s one of the most brutally realistic and sorrowful portrayals of depression I’ve ever seen.

Some call it a zombie film, but it isn’t—not in the traditional sense. The zombie here is the illness itself, an allegory woven through religion and the comet from which the film takes its title.

Halley’s Comet appears every 76 years—roughly the span of a human life. Like the comet, Alberto’s existence feels cyclical and inevitable—a cosmic recurrence of decay that mirrors our own transient lives.

Religion insists we should be grateful to feel alive. But again—is it really worth living a life when you feel nothing?

"Halley" isn’t about death so much as it is about the slow erosion of existence—the unbearable stillness of a life that continues long after the soul has already laid its roses on the grave.

It unfolds like a reading between two books—Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag and Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher—grieving, philosophical, and steeped in decay as both theme and texture. Less a film to be reviewed than an essay on mortality disguised as one.

It leaves you wondering: what happens when the body keeps moving, but everything inside has already gone still?