Fracturas
2021 · 13m · España
Directed by Fernando Tato
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
The disappearance of a girl triggers an incessant and agonising search. Nair, a mother broken by grief, and Aníbal, a mysterious and tormented character, decide to take justice into their own hands: anything goes as long as they find the girl and punish those responsible for her disappearance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a grief-revenge thriller that plays it mostly straight—grief-stricken mother, mysterious accomplice, justice spiral—and I'd expect to roll my eyes, except Tato seems genuinely interested in the *fracture* itself, the moment where maternal love splinters into something unrecognizable, which is darker than the plot summary suggests.
Tato situates this squarely in the lineage of morally ambiguous European crime cinema—Haneke's proceduralism, perhaps a touch of Kiarostami's interrogation of justice—and the film's discipline lies in refusing easy catharsis; the editing and sound design maintain a clinical distance from Nair's anguish, which is the work of a director thinking formally about complicity.
The singular move here is the decision to keep Aníbal deliberately opaque and tormented rather than clarify his role—that ambiguity, held with such restraint across 13 minutes, transforms what could be a revenge plot into something about the unknowability of co-conspirators and shared obsession.