 |
| Images Courtesy of Giant Pictures |
In 2023,
director Hugo Ruiz’s debut feature film, One Night with Adela won him
the Best New Narrative Filmmaker award at the Tribeca Film Festival. This
week, the film is finally available for consumption via digital rental.
Featuring an unforgettably vile and heartbreaking central performance,
blistering nocturnal visuals, and a jaw dropping climax, this is one of the
most harrowing cinematic experiences of the year.
Adela is a
street sweeper who works the night shift in Madrid. Fueled by hatred and
hardcore narcotics, Adela decides one fateful evening to settle some old scores
with those who have wronged her. Ruiz also wrote the script, which approaches
generational trauma, perversity, and violence with an almost primal sense of
understanding. Adela is more of a force, a totemic summation of trauma
and grief that threatens to leap from the screen into the viewer's
subconscious. Laura Galan (Piggy) gives another bravura
performance; perhaps one of the year's best. She brings a level of
physicality to the role that only enhances Adela’s aura of peril, making her
not Alice, but the Red Queen in Ruiz’s wicked wonderland of the night.
Diego Trenas'
cinematography is the standout. The film is shot as a single take,
inspired by 2015's Victoria. The faded, unpleasant colors of
Madrid in twilight are extensions of Adela's grim reality, with bright pops of
color dappled throughout as popular (and relevant) Spanish songs lace the
proceedings with feelings of longing and loneliness. Everything is
distilled through Galan's jaw dropping commitment to Ruiz's tainted
vision. The yield is a pitch-black climax that the viewer will struggle
to forget.
While there is violence and some truly stunning revelations, at its core this is
a story about isolation, both self-imposed and inflicted by those we hold dearest. Ruiz’s canvas, the ruins of Adela’s life
within the ruins of the fabled Madrid is an inspired choice and the final yield
is a commentary on the many, many people who struggle with demons that we encounter
virtually every day, with most of these encounters being forgettable acknowledgements. Adela is those nonchalant greetings come to
roost, and roost, she does.
Now available
for digital streaming, One Night with Adela is an audacious debut from
what promises to be a talented filmmaker. Ruiz's attention to detail
allows this to rise above simple genre fair to approach an arthouse nightmare
of vendetta that manages to conjure memories of Ferrara's Bad Leuitenant.
Shocking, appalling, and dangerously mysterious, this is a film that is
experienced more than it is seen and that most certainly was the intent.
--Kyle
Jonathan