Enrique Urbizu's career is a curious anomaly in Spanish filmmaking. Spanish genre filmmakers usually score a couple of box office gongs and go on to collaborate with renowned international actors, screenwriters or directors, then feel disappointed or frustrated with the experience and go back home where their creative freedom is less restricted. (After directing Nicole Kidman in The Others, produced by Tom Cruise, Alejandro Amenábar shot The Sea Inside with an all-Spanish cast, while Jaume Balagueró chose Manuela Velasco for the lead of his hit Rec after unsuccessful collaborations with Anna Paquin and Calista Flockhart).Urbizu has followed a similar path, but in an almost inverse chronological order. After a couple of pleasant but forgettable comedies, he surprisingly scripted Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate before enjoying general success at home with two thrillers: La caja 507 and La vida mancha.
No habrá paz para los malvados -or, to use the title that rolls off the cosmopolitan tongues, No Rest for the Wicked- is a perfect follow-up to those two titles: a deft, gripping cop thriller against the backdrop of drug trafficking, police corruption and Islamic terrorism.
José Coronado, a regular of Urbizu's films, brilliantly plays boozy detective Santos Trinidad, a police inspector once hugely admired, now disgraced, who gets involved in a triple murder whose ramifications will lead him to the hidden underworld of crime and, ultimately, to his own redemption. Urbizu keeps the narrative engine ticking over with compelling throb, each new piece of the puzzle perfectly fitting with the previous one. In fact, the film is maybe most surprising because -or despite, and depending on your take on the question you will like or not the film- everything is exactly what it seems. There is an aptly forensic approach to the way Urbizu disentangles the mystery, not least on account of that sort of narrative traceability so common in modern thrillers (a name saved in a cellular phone which leads to a car whose sat-nav remembers its last journey guiding the hero to a crucial clue).
Some journalists were complaining about the film's predictability after the press screening, which is precisely the reason why I find it so purely enjoyable. And of course, there is a powerful central performance from Coronado, impressive in his role as the quintessential antihero. This is the first film in competition shown at the festival, but his name must necessarily be kept in mind for the final kudos.
