In cinema as in literature, it doesn’t matter, the genre is like checkered slippers. Bad simile for this summer that is already ending, but the idea is understood: our level of demand relaxes with the immediate reward that implies recognizing the distinctive features of the thriller, a genre that, to simplify, we could say that it replaced film noir , in a more muscular, dynamic and full color version, from the seventies. An extreme situation from which it seems impossible to get out, crimes, mysteries, police officers, suspects, anguish, tension, rarefied environments… These are elements that make us feel at home. Maximum comfort. But the thriller is also a field open to experimentation, an essential condition to continue advancing.
After last season, marked by the national and international success of As bestas, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s rural thriller, and also, if you like, Pacificction, Albert Serra’s masterpiece, which could be read as a political and paranoid thriller , like those made in the seventies, we have spoken with a producer, a scriptwriter and a director, responsible for three of the titles that have given another twist to the genre in recent months. They are Enrique López Lavigne (Siege), Rafa Cobos (The left-handed son) and Pablo Maqueda (The unknown). We will also recall some of the most significant Spanish thrillers, from different perspectives, both in movies and in series, over the last decade, which began with a generational renewal and well-nourished rooms of fans and has resulted, in some cases, in a certain aesthetic tameness derived from the use and abuse of platforms. It happens in the best countries: South Korea, which since the beginning of the millennium has been an unavoidable benchmark in the matter at hand, now produces many bland and impersonal versions of the genre, already thought of as white-label products for the big platforms, without be validated at festivals.
In contrast to that standardization process, gems like Siege continue to appear. This is not the first film by Miguel Ángel Vivas to be produced by Enrique López Lavigne (Madrid, 1967), the most enthusiastic and cinephile of our native producers. Before, he wrapped up Your son (2018), with Jose Coronado, and very varied thrillers by various authors (Goodbye, Open windows, Toro, Intacto…). Written by journalist Marta Medina, Siege may seem like a riot police spin-off, but it ends up leading to an unexpected and hallucinated sorority between two warriors from antagonistic continents. The film did not quite find its audience in its passage through the theaters. The producer regrets the disappearance of what he calls “the middle class”, that sector of the public among the cinephilia of the V.O. and the more familiar or adolescent audience in shopping centers. If it seems clear that the platforms have kidnapped that middle class, they also offer a second life to movies like Siege, which was the most viewed on the platform as soon as it arrived on Amazon. It already happened to Lavigne with Toro (Kike Maíllo, 2016): “Another film that could have given more of itself. He had potential because he was facing Luis Tosar and Mario Casas. The idea was to make a hyper-violent Korean-style film, in an environment for summer enjoyment like Torremolinos. It is also true that, with that title, it had a bad time in some places, but it was one of the first hits on Netflix, and there are places like Mexico where it has become a cult film.
In theory, and sometimes also in practice –as in the As bestas case–, the thriller is an ideal genre for that middle class. It offers tension and suspense, and at the same time it tends to convey social and political criticism, being the photo of a country. In this sense, Asedio, which has an important component of denunciation, follows the path “of the cinema that we began to develop in the nineties, during the lead years of ETA, when filmmakers like Enrique Urbizu appeared in Euskadi with Todo por la pasta ( 1991), or Daniel Calparsoro with Salto al vacío (1995), who have continued with the genre to this day. Now all that is beginning to change. Starting with the Baztán Trilogy and ending with Juan-Gómez Jurado, who has signed with Amazon to develop exclusive concepts, a lighter and more innocuous thriller began to take shape”. The dictatorship of the algorithm tends to identify thousands of readers with new subscribers. The numbers rule.
Rafael Cobos (Seville, 1973), who signed Toro’s script, also praises maestro Urbizu: “La caja 207 (2002) is a clear example of this type of thriller that is very entertaining and at the same time has a layer of criticism and to tell the moment that the country is going through”. As a co-writer of all of Alberto Rodríguez’s films, he has struggled in the genre in a big way. They started with Grupo 7 (2012): “We received the summary of an acquaintance who was linked to a case of police corruption, and from there we generated a fiction. L. 627 (Bertrand Tavernier, 1992) inspired us a lot to make a film with the heart of a thriller, but from reality”. Then came La isla mínima, El hombre de las mil caras, or the recent Modelo 77, which began filming before our most emblematic prison closed.
With the miniseries El hijo zurdo, a jewel in the Movistar catalogue, he has embraced his most personal project, not only because he has directed two of the six episodes for the first time, but also because it is a creation entirely of his own, although based on the novel. by Rosario Izquierdo, in which he has taken care of all the details with the utmost care. It could be defined as “an emotional thriller”, since it tells us about two women, from very different social conditions (immense María León and Tamara Casellas), who discover that their beloved children have become dangerous Nazis, a rigorously topical topic. El hijo zurdo is, therefore, also a social thriller, “although that type of thriller tends to be dirtier and uglier, and we wanted to move away from that and do something more pop, so that the image was not so attached to the discourse, but rather was somewhere else, just like music”. Daniela Cajías (Alcarràs) signs the beautiful photograph and the soundtrack parades through the underground medium of Seville and its surroundings, Andalusia in any case: Bronquio, Rocío Márquez, Dalila, and Nita, from Fuel Fandango, wonders where will calm come from? ?
The key to its extraordinary freshness and originality is also in the essentialization of the product: “Everything had to be fibrous, that it was there because it had an ultimate meaning, not because it had to take 40 or 45 minutes.” Indeed, none of the six episodes exceeds 25 minutes, there is not an ounce of the usual seriéphile filler. Cobos is pleased that “Movistar gave us absolute freedom and even spurred us towards something different. We were very clear that we did not want to follow what is done on television, to stay in that warm and conventional space.
In the midst of the convulsed panorama of the national thriller, a Martian film called The Unknown has also emerged this year. For his first fiction film, Pablo Maqueda (Madrid, 1985), who discovered “the magic of cinema after seeing Amenábar’s Thesis (1996), although I think it was because he was very young at the time”, he has rewritten the work for the screen. Grooming by Paco Bezerra, with the help of the playwright. The approach could not be more uncomfortable: the encounter between a pedophile fan of Julio Iglesias, played by Manolo Solo, and his alleged victim, a teenager whom he has managed to get out of the house by blackmailing her online, played by Laia Manzanares . The film is so unsettling that this chronicler had a hard time getting in as well as getting out. It’s been over a month and The Stranger still haunts me. Very bad roll.
Maqueda acknowledges that “it is not an easy experience”, and that, although the film summons an endless number of foreign references, from Hitchcock to Haneke, passing through Mankiewicz’s footprint, due to its theatrical acting duel, it is difficult to find a dance partner for it in the national noir. “Yes, at one point in writing, Bezerra told me that he saw many connections with La huella, which also proposes a game with the viewer, with unexpected twists. But in Spain we would have to go back to very distant examples, such as El clove (Rafael Gil, 1944), El cebo (Ladislao Vajda, 1958), or even El extraño viaje (Fernando Fernán-Gómez, 1964)”, he comments.
It is true that the character of the pedophile almost coincides on the billboard with that of Manticora, by Carlos Vermut, one of the great Spanish films of the year, although there the treatment of the story is more melodramatic and conceptual. “Yes, Manticora is a great film, just like Magical Girl (2014), which seems to me to be the best Spanish film of the last twenty-five years, but I am more in the tradition of the bomb under the table”. To the play, which took place almost entirely in a corner of the park, Maqueda has added some flashbacks, to give us more information about the characters, but above all to integrate that costumbrismo that characterizes our thrillers. “Santiago Racaj, who is also the cinematographer of all Jonás Trueba’s films, has helped us find that Rohmerian Madrid, very close to us, but in which very terrifying things can also happen. Costumbrismo is usually associated with the social, and that is something we wanted to break with”.
Faced with a film in which it is impossible to empathize with its characters, Maqueda explains that he wanted to “break with the viewer’s mimesis”, but also for the viewer to have the opportunity to reflect on his own paraphilias: “Those secrets that we are going to take to the grave, because we have not socialized with anyone, for fear of guilt and of being judged”. Maybe it turns out that passion for thrillers is also a paraphilia. May heaven judge us.
