Review: THE REALM

We first see a man in a blue suit on a beach take a phone call. He turns and strides into a building, goes (in a Goodfellas-style continuous tracking shot) through the kitchen of a restaurant, picks up a plate of prawns and delivers it to a table of high-lifers in style. The moment is small in their lives but noted as a kind of pulled favour by the lunch host. That's Manuel, political stoker and boiler. The conversation is as rapid as the music video cuts but you're not meant to get details, just the vibe that you are watching wealth and privilege. In a loo break during the lunch the president hints to Manuel that he is about to come into a promotion. Later, he wakes from an afternoon nap into a scandal filling the media like a burst water main. He's at its centre.

Most of the course of this film is his efforts to first staunch the flow of damage to the government he's part of and then, as more fellow conspirators are thrown under buses by the party, he himself is on the plank. The gigantic second act of this Spanish political thriller is taken up with this struggle as Manuel dialogues his way through fall guys and old faithfuls in need of bolster as his chances of getting out clean drain like dirty bathwater.

There is no ambiguity about his guilt, the film depends on our knowing that for the character to deal freely with his co-conspirators. What is the crime involved? Well, it's a kind of siphoning off of public money with a land zoning scam. Details emerge slowly in this story of information as wealth but you get the idea. More importantly you see how a character who is aware of his own sin but oblivious to its effects develops from forceful arrogance through an increasing desperation as his political survival turns to one of physical life and death.

Antonio de la Torre gives Manuel a performance that picks up nuance as his character must, going from an unchallenged bluster through a kind of acquired begging to an animal wildness as he sees the struggle become mortal. There are certainly times when we might wonder if we can follow him with such a lack of remorse for his actions but it is well before he is made a clear victim the we understand how novel this journey is. This is nowhere near the overwrought bombast of Bad Lieutenant or the more tragic downward slide of Raging Bull. He has chosen, in strength, to be a bad man. We long to see him understand this and for the moment it happens. When it does it is the least Hollywood of climaxes you could expect from the spectacle you've been witnessing. A question. Fade to black.

Robust cinema that rises above its risk.