The Realm

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's third solo feature arrived in 2018, while Spain was still working its way through the corruption trials that had consumed a decade of its politics, and it turned him into the most argued-over Spanish director of his generation. El reino premiered in Contemporary World Cinema at Toronto, competed for the Golden Shell at San Sebastián, and then took seven prizes at the 33rd Goya Awards, among them Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Sorogoyen and his long-standing writing partner Isabel Peña.

Antonio de la Torre plays Manuel López Vidal, a regional deputy secretary whose life of restaurant tables, favours and quietly handled envelopes starts to come apart when a leak reaches the press. Alejandro de Pablo shoots in restless, prowling handheld that rarely lets the camera settle; Alberto del Campo's Goya-winning editing keeps the film a step ahead of its protagonist; and Olivier Arson's electronic score, also a Goya winner, runs underneath the whole thing like a pulse rate. The supporting bench — Bárbara Lennie, Mónica López, Ana Wagener, Luis Zahera, Josep Maria Pou — reads as a roll-call of contemporary Spanish acting.

Critics received it as the definitive screen account of the Spanish political class, and it holds 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. What lingers is less the specific scandal than the texture of complicity Sorogoyen builds: the sense of an institution in which everyone is implicated and nobody is quite responsible. The same machinery, transposed to a police unit and then a Galician village, drives Riot Police and As Bestas.