Atentado
2020 · 20m · España
Directed by Roberto Chinet
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
On the 15th anniversary of his father's death — the day chosen to avenge it — Manu crosses paths in a tram with Mónica, a young woman from an upper-middle-class family. Two fragments of life separated by social condition but united by hatred and incomprehension will cross that same day to change their destinies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a class-collision thriller, but Chinet treats it with too much restraint—there's a missed chance here to let the social resentment actually detonate instead of just simmer in the tram car.
Atentado positions itself squarely in the Spanish social-realist lineage, using the confined tram as a deliberate formal constraint that recalls both Haneke's clinical precision and the Dardenne brothers' moral weight; the 20 minutes earn their gravity through compositional discipline.
What lifts this beyond its thriller skeleton is Chinet's choice to let the camera hold on the mundane—the tram's fluorescent routine—before the tension arrives, making the ordinariness itself the pressure point that makes their collision feel inevitable rather than incidental.