The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box)

The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box) (Spanish: El Diablo Fuma (y guarda las cabezas de los cerillos quemados en la misma caja)) is a 2025 Mexican drama film co-written and directed by Ernesto Martínez Bucio.

The film centres on five siblings — Vanessa (Laura Uribe Rojas), Victor (Donovan Said), Elsa (Mariapau Bravo Avina), Marisol (Regina Alejandra) and Tomas (Rafael Nieto Martinez) — who are abandoned by their parents Judith (Micaela Gramajo) and Emiliano (Bernardo Gamboa), and must find ways to survive while in the care of their paranoid schizophrenic grandmother Romana (Carmen Ramos).

The film premiered in February 2025 at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. The film is scheduled to be released commercially on 23 April 2026, in Mexican theaters.

Jonathan Holland of Screen Daily wrote that "the formal experimentation of The Devil Smokes, is sometimes effective, sometimes not. It delivers most strongly in the oppressive atmospherics as Odei Zabaleta’s busy camera roams around the cluttered interiors of this shadowy house, taking us on a journey into a claustrophobic, dark little world from which we emerge, blinking and slightly traumatized, at the end."

For Variety, Guy Lodge wrote that "the singed sepia tones favored by Martínez Bucio and Zabaleta may recall sun-faded or ill-developed images from a family album, to the extent that some shots appear edged with film burn, but the effect isn’t one of warm nostalgia. Instead, there’s a vague end-of-days feel to the film’s parched, shadowy visuals, as Zabaleta’s prowling camera renders the layout of the home smaller with each passing minute. In so many such stories of children in crisis, the hovering presence of social services is presented as a threat; here, the authorities may well be letting the light in."

• The Devil Smokes at IMDb