'One X Two': The resentment between friends in a unique genre entertainment

There's a virtually unknown director in Spain making a kind of cinema that (almost) no one else is making. A genre film, without major social pretensions (although there are some underlying flaws), fresh, entertaining, and effervescent, whose references seem far from this country, although at some point one might think that his last two films would have fit well with the wave of new directors of the 1990s, that of the young Alejandro Amenábar and Álex de la Iglesia . His name is Alberto Utrera, and although he's already a bit older (45), he's made his mark with two unique and commendable films. Last year's Desmontando a Lucía was a neo-noir with a black comedy tone and hints of thriller. Now, Uno x dos is a generational thriller about ambition and despair, which almost veers into horror, set in a single location and with just five characters, centered around a 15-point match in a football pool.

Neither will go down in history, nor do they have to because, among other things, they don't claim to, but both fulfill their purpose—that of traditional genre cinema—and can be remarkable in the sense of their anomaly in a Spanish cinema dominated by other styles, references, and objectives. Great summer movies, popcorn, and superficial emotions.

A late director, with a lot of television and publicity before making the leap to feature-length after having already worked in short films, Utrera seems to have sprouted from the seed of nineties cinema. In fact, Uno equis dos, written with Carlos Soria and apparently inspired by a true story, has abundant generic, thematic, tonal, psychological, and even sociological parallels with an admirable debut, now buried in oblivion, even though it is one of the best films by its acclaimed (and subsequently uneven) director: Tumba abre (1994), by Danny Boyle , immediately preceding the blockbuster Trainspotting.

In "Open Grave ," it was a suitcase full of money, and here, a million-dollar lottery ticket about to be filled. But the essential thing in both cases is the protagonists' status as close friends, a lifelong gang with the resulting mutual knowledge of each other's inner workings (for the good, and for the much less good), and the volcanic component of boundless ambition, sometimes lodged in the most hidden corners of the human being. Violence and death don't arise for no reason, or just because there's money about to be grabbed and slipping through your fingers, but because our existences corrode us from within, and the disarray between desire and power place you on the brink of resentment. Few rottenness is more painful than the economic, social, and human rivalry between friends. Or between couples: "How long has it been since we've had sex?" The withdrawn, animal masculinity that ends up exploding, and femininity torn between tolerance and slaughter.

Each of the four main actors gives their characters exactly what they expect: the seductive aggression of Paco León ; the sibylline elegance of Stéphanie Magnin ; the (un)healthy voluptuousness of Kimberley Tell ; and the moral defeat of Raúl Tejón . And Utrera, with an effective (though not brilliant) staging of action and terror, and good photography with the beautiful interior and exterior lighting of Miguel Ángel García, handles his mischievous cinematic toy with conviction until its moral(istic) epilogue.