The People Upstairs

Cesc Gay is the finest chronicler of the Spanish middle-class in its forties and fifties — its friendships, its marriages, its quiet crises. His Truman swept the Goyas in 2016, and A Gun in Each Hand dissected male insecurity through a string of two-handers. The People Upstairs, released in 2020 and adapted from his own stage play Los vecinos de arriba, distils those interests into a single evening in a single flat.

Javier Cámara and the Argentine actress Griselda Siciliani play Julio and Ana, a long-married couple whose relationship now runs almost entirely on sniping. Belén Cuesta and Alberto San Juan are Laura and Salva, the cheerful neighbours from the floor above, whose enthusiastic nightlife has become a running torment for Julio. Gay keeps the staging theatrical but never static, letting the dinner build through awkward small talk, misread signals and escalating candour, and the dialogue is sharp enough that every silence lands. Cámara is wonderfully sour, Siciliani brittle and funny, and San Juan steals scenes as a man with no apparent sense of embarrassment.

It earned five Goya nominations, winning Best Supporting Actor for San Juan, and a European Film Award nomination for Best Comedy. Brisk, adult and genuinely funny about desire, boredom and long marriage, it is Spanish chamber comedy at its most assured — a film that gets more honest the longer the wine flows.