El desconocido
Dani de la Torre (2015)
The Spanish title means ‘The Unknown’ but we know from the start that the main character of Dani de la Torre’s thriller is, by virtue of his line of work, a suitable case for retribution. Carlos (Luis Tosar) is a banking executive in present-day Spain (the film was shot in Galicia); just in case that’s not enough, de la Torre introduces us to Carlos, before he leaves for work one morning, talking on the phone to a colleague – we learn they’ve been involved in selling dodgy investments and are now preparing a damage-limitation strategy for when the news becomes public. Carlos surely deserves whatever’s heading his way. It’s clear too from the opening sequence at the family home that there are serious tensions between him and his wife Marta (Goya Toledo). He is (unusually, we gather) going to do the morning school run with the couple’s two children – Sara (Paula del Río) and her younger brother Marcos (Marco Sanz) – before he drives on to the office. Carlos registers surprise, when they go to the car, that the doors are already unlocked. Sara says the inside of the car ‘smells funny’. Shortly after the start of their journey, Carlos picks up a call on his mobile. A man’s voice tells him that bombs have been planted in the car and will be detonated if anyone tries to move from their seat: if Carlos wants to stay alive and his children to survive, he must transfer a large sum of money to the bank account that the anonymous caller gives him.
Dani de la Torre keeps the action mostly inside Carlos’s car and tells the story in something approaching real time. Directing his first feature (from a screenplay by Alberto Marini), de la Torre exerts and maintains a firm grip on the viewer’s nerves. Although the menacing score by Manuel Riveiro is pretty superfluous in the circumstances, de la Torre is well served by his editor, Jorge Coira, and his cinematographer, Josu Inchaustegui. (I liked, as well as the dynamic city scenes, the opening shots of Retribution, in which the camera moves down from a God’s-eye view of a mysterious green landscape to a housing development and the roof of Carlos’s house there; this roof is also green, with a covering of artificial grass.) Both child actors are good – Paula del Río especially – and Luis Tosar is excellent as Carlos. Tosar’s strong features supply a sustained visual and emotional focus; he’s also sympathetic enough to modify Carlos’s vocational villainy – to make you admire this man’s thwarted but persistent determination to hold himself and the children together, and find a way out of the nightmare. At the same time, we find out more about the extent and consequences of what Carlos and his banking cronies have been up to. It comes as no surprise that the explosive devices have been set by a man impelled to avenge the death of his wife, who committed suicide when, thanks to Carlos, she lost her savings. The car journey is also, and no less predictably, an opportunity for Dani de la Torre to expand on the causes of the failure of Carlos’s marriage: he put his job before his family and Marta is preparing to divorce him. Sara is old enough to understand and be angry with her father for this; when, eventually, he breaks down emotionally in the car, of course it’s the start of a rapprochement between him and his daughter.
While the film’s anti-bankers invective is nothing if not obvious, I was less clear if the police handling of Carlo’s predicament was also intended as a quasi-political comment. It’s particularly extraordinary (albeit crucial to the plot) that the police, without doing any identity checks, allow Carlos’s nemesis to pass himself off as his brother, walk up to the car and explain his motives to Carlos – although the impressively anonymous Javier Gutiérrez (Marshland) delivers a well-judged cameo as the blackmailer-bomber (according to the IMDB cast list, he is the titular ‘El Desconocido’). It’s surprising too that, at the end of the family’s ordeal, security is lax enough to allow Sara to run a long way round a quayside for a big emotional reunion with Carlos. The blustering police chief Espinosa (Fernando Cayo) crosses swords with, and is made to look a fool beside, the shrewder, more sensitive bomb disposal expert Belén (Elvira Minguez). De la Torre shows storytelling skill, though, in developing the exchanges between these two from what at first seems a mere interlude – and, for the audience, a chance to draw breath – into part of the main action.
Retribution is an effective thriller but, as expected, the moral resolution is over-explicit (except that the film skates over the legal repercussions of the protagonist’s professional misconduct). In a short epilogue, we learn that Carlos, in the aftermath of his bad day in the car, was shabbily treated by his employers – the implication is rather that, once you’ve been screwed by bankers, you officially become one of the good guys. The embittered man who terrorises Carlos and his family insists to Carlos, in that improbable through-the-car-window conversation, that what he’s doing he’s doing on behalf of many others – and I guess the message of Retribution will speak to plenty of people, not least in Spain. I’m not sure, though, that, if I’d lost money as a result of financial fraud, I’d want a commercial movie director to express my outrage for me.
12 October 2015
