Seven Years

Four partners founded a technology company and the company grew. Then the tax evasion came out. The prosecutor has the file and there is only one way out: if one of them takes the blame and serves seven years, the others are clear. They spend a night in the office trying to decide who goes. A mediator is with them, and his job is to stay neutral. Roger Gual directs. The cast includes Àlex Brendemühl, Paco León, Juana Acosta and Manuel Morón, with Juan Pablo Raba as the mediator. It was announced as Netflix's first Spanish original film and went out in 2016. The form is close to theatre. It takes place in one location, runs short, and moves nearly in real time; the camera never leaves the room. The engine is not a moral calculation but a calculation of interest. Everyone has a valid excuse: a child, an illness, a share of the company. The film does not say who is right. The mediator is its best idea, standing in for the audience as the only stranger in the room, and becoming a party to it by the end. The weakness is the ending. The tension built across the film is resolved by a reversal in the last ten minutes, and it is too tidy for the hardness that came before. Who it is for: viewers who like single location thrillers and films built on moral dilemma. Who it is not for: it rests entirely on dialogue, is visually static, and the characters never quite stop being carriers of an argument.