May God Save Us

The film that made Rodrigo Sorogoyen's name premiered in main competition at the 64th San Sebastián International Film Festival in September 2016, where he and Isabel Peña won the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay. That prize matters beyond the film: it marked the point at which the Sorogoyen–Peña partnership, which has written everything he has directed since, became the most reliable screenwriting act in Spanish cinema.

The setting is Madrid in the summer of 2011, a city rendered as a pressure cooker — heat, the occupied squares of the 15-M movement, a papal visit consuming every available officer. Into that, two detectives are assigned a case nobody wants. Antonio de la Torre plays Velarde as a withdrawn man with a stammer and few social defences; Roberto Álamo plays Alfaro as someone permanently a sentence away from violence, a performance that won him the Goya for Best Actor. Sorogoyen shoots the procedural material plainly and then lets it curdle, using the investigation less as a puzzle than as a way of examining the two men carrying it.

It is a hard watch by design, and reviewers said so while praising the control: Jonathan Holland in The Hollywood Reporter called it a taut and distinctive whole. Alongside Marshland, it belongs to the run of films that rebuilt Spanish genre cinema in the 2010s, and it set the template — moral compromise, institutional rot, escalating dread — that The Realm and Riot Police would refine.