At the End of the Tunnel

Joaquín, a computer engineer in a wheelchair, lives alone in a large house after an accident. Listening to the noises from his basement, he works out that a gang is digging a tunnel from the building next door to a bank vault. With the woman who moves in as a tenant and her daughter, he starts making a plan of his own. The film is not interested in the robbery. It is interested in listening: the hero cannot move, but he hears, records and gathers information first. Its suspense is built out of sound more than image. The form is faithful to genre: confined space, information released in stages, and a violent turn in the last act. The distance between the basement and the house is the film's entire geography. Rodrigo Grande wrote and directed, in an Argentine and Spanish co-production. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Joaquín, Clara Lago the tenant and Pablo Echarri the leader of the gang. Who it is for: viewers who like heist thrillers and Spanish-language genre cinema. Who it is not for: anyone after realism. The plan in the last act works too perfectly, and the film gives its hero more luck than he has earned.