The film is set in, and captures beautifully Madrid’s hot summer of 2011, when the Pope was about to visit and when the 15-M anti-austerity protest movement was being born in the city’s centre, pulling the city in two opposing ideological directions and creating one almighty security headache.
For much of its length the film mixes up police procedural, social grit, character study, black humor and Catholicism into a taut and distinctive whole which first focuses on the investigation and later enters the world of a killer. One lengthy set-piece had been hailed as one of the finest suspenseful sequences to have ever been filmed in Madrid.
