El número de Dios
2022 · 20m · España
Directed by Sergio Barba
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Jaime and Martín, two hitmen from the Costa del Sol, receive a call from their boss indicating a change in the working conditions they initially agreed; by chance, they stop at a roadside restaurant in Marbella to eat something before resuming the new 'assignment', but there, Jaime will come face to face with an old acquaintance with whom he had an incident a week ago.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two hitmen stop for a bite and the whole job implodes over a chance encounter—it's a genre movie that knows its own tropes well enough to sabotage them from inside, and Barba refuses to let the setup resolve the way you're already betting it will.
The film's restraint in its formal construction—how it layers tension through mundane diner staging and lets the dialogue do the heavy lifting—situates it squarely in a lineage of European crime cinema that values implication over spectacle.
The decision to make the inciting incident happen not through the job itself but through a casual social collision transforms what could've been another cartel thriller into something about proximity and accident; that one choice rewires the entire engine.