“It’s not TV,” HBO used to claim of itself. Watching the first 12 minutes of Enrique Urbizu ’s crime thriller “When Nobody Sees Us,” Max ’s first Spanish original sneak-peaked at San Sebastián Festival Monday morning, the legendary HBO slogan came to mind. Rather than TV, the scenes are pure cinema of the highest order.
In them, a man in a white ceremonial robe, kneels, draws a sword, carefully places it to his abdomen, and commits hari-kari. Then a float of the local virgin edges down a street of whitewashed houses on the first day of Holy Week, in the village of Morón de la Frontera, Andalusia, southern Spain. When it stops, a young man emerges from the packed rows of penitents carrying it and, now out in the street, hallucinates that fellow black-hooded penitents and then the float itself levitate high in the sky.
He collapses, his eyes bleeding. Magaly Castillo, a U.S.
army military police lieutenant, emerges from a plane that has just touched down at the U.S. Army Air Force base.
Lucía Gutiérrez, a Spanish Civil Guard colonel, leaves her aged mother and daughter at home. Magaly is also seen putting on her uniform. Lucia arrives late at the procession before being called away to inspect the body of the suicide.
“What a f***** up way to kill yourself,” says her assistant. “Isn’t there any way that isn’t?” Gutiérrez replies tartly. “When Nobody Sees Us” is produced for Warner Bros.
Discovery by Spain’s Zeta Studios, behind “Elite..
