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The grimmest of Berlanga's works I've watched so far is The Executioner (1963) a squirm-inducing death penalty comedy in which murder is just another way to get ahead. Displaying the full range of Berlanga's gift for caricature, deep-focus joke-building and disgust with the Franco regime, it's a comedy in which the laughs die in your throat.

Berlanga never gets graphic but the stakes are full-frontal, and certain images... bind in the memory. Berlanga's style – he loved detailed compositions bustling with four or more characters talking over each other, keying into modern Spain's frustration and claustrophobia – sometimes requires attention and re-viewing, but the payoff is rich and resonant. Yet another fascinating New Wave-era resurrection that rewrites what we thought we knew about post-war European cinema.

It's an indictment of capital punishment on par with Oshima's Death by Hanging and Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing, but this pitch-black comedy, released at the peak of the Franco era, is less timely agitprop than timeless study in ordinary desperation.

The film digs deep into the human capacity for accepting violence and oppression as ordinary. Focusing not on the orchestrators of violence or the victims of it, the film showcases how malleable the mind and spirit of a passive bystander is under a dictatorship. As marriage and funerals stand in for Franco's dictatorial regime, the fragility of these institutions reflect on the weakness of any system.

You could say that The Executioner (1963) is a one-joke comedy and that the joke isn't funny. This sounds like a death sentence for any movie, but in fact it's the key to why Luis García Berlanga's film is so wonderful. The whole story is devoted to a single absurd yet perfectly credible premise, a joke aimed at society and the human condition, delivered deadpan with a pace more funereal than farcical.

Berlanga's directorial hand is remarkable for its navigation of glances and hesitations, especially among the three leads. When José Luis and Carmen first meet, neither of them verbalizes their attraction to one another, though it's especially apparent in Carmen's eyes, which Penella plays with superb simplicity.

Visually speaking, nothing calls too much attention to itself, but Berlanga moves the camera freely, creating strikingly composed wide shots that take advantage of the frame's ability to accommodate as many people as possible, resulting in frenzied sequences of overlapping dialogue. Images that at first appear unremarkable become stirring in the scope of the whole film.

If Plácido unmasked the dominant discourses surrounding the traditional family and Christian charity, El verdugo, arguably García Berlanga's finest film, struck at the very heart of the repressive Francoist state.

Formally Berlanga's most elegant film, it was shot by Pasolini and Leone's cinematographer, the great Tonino Delli Colli. (More's the pity that the print on view is a mass of murk.) Despite censor cuts, Verdugo remains a powerful condemnation of capital punishment and the Francoist myths of duty and patriotism.