The Invisible Guest

Oriol Paulo's The Invisible Guest (Spanish: Contratiempo) opened in Spain in January 2017 and went on to become one of the most-watched Spanish-language films on Netflix outside Spanish-speaking markets. In China it turned into something else entirely, a viral phenomenon: its theatrical re-release there in autumn 2017 sold over $90 million in tickets, an extraordinary result for a Spanish-language chamber thriller.

Paulo had already directed The Body (Spanish: El cuerpo) in 2012, another tightly built mystery thriller, and the two films made him one of the most exportable Spanish writer-directors of his generation. He followed them with Mirage (Spanish: Durante la tormenta) in 2018, also a global Netflix success, and in 2021 with The Innocent (Spanish: El inocente), a multi-season series cut from the same cloth as The Invisible Guest.

Mario Casas leads the cast. At the time he was the most prominent young leading man in Spain, moving between commercial youth pictures and prestige features, and he is joined by Ana Wagener, José Coronado, Bárbara Lennie and Paco Tous. Xavi Giménez, Paulo's longtime cinematographer and a veteran of several Jaume Balagueró productions, shot it. Paulo wrote the screenplay himself, with a co-credit for Lara Sendim, and its structure shows the influence of Hitchcock, of Polanski's chamber thrillers and of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.