La Nueve
2019 · 14m · España
Directed by Daniel Hernández Torrado
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Manuel joins the Ninth Company to save his daughter from Nazi-occupied Paris, inspired by the true story of the Ninth Company, formed entirely of Spanish exiles, spearhead of the Allied army in the liberation of Europe.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the father-saves-daughter war story to hit hard; Torrado just refuses to make it easy, stripping the sentiment down to something almost glacial—which is exactly why it sticks.
A scrupulous historical drama that treats the Ninth Company's erasure from Allied narrative with formal precision, each compositional choice and cut earning its weight in a film that knows exactly where it sits in the lineage of war cinema.
The film lives or dies on the decision to keep Manuel's face mostly shadowed until the final moment of reckoning—that withholding of emotional clarity is what transforms a historical premise into something that actually breathes.