Un mundo salvaje
2019 · 25m · España
Directed by David Santamaría, Rodrigo Marini
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
El Santo, a Madrid underworld mafioso obsessed with loyalty, is surrounded by his favourite hitman Dante, his trusted cook Benigna and his loyal half-rate torturer Evaristo, until Kira, an enigmatic woman thirsting for vengeance, unleashes hatreds from a past he believed buried.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Madrid crime thriller that could've been another tired cartel saga instead pivots into absurdist character study—the half-rate torturer, the loyal cook, a vengeance plot that upends the mafioso's entire mythology. This is the kind of premise that makes you lean in because it refuses to play the hits straight.
Santamaría and Marini work within the crime-thriller lineage but with formal precision in how they construct loyalty as both architecture and trap; the ensemble dynamic recalls the best of Spanish genre cinema, where moral texture matters as much as plot momentum.
The film's entire engine turns on the choice to make Kira's vengeance personal rather than political, which reframes every earlier scene and forces the ensemble to recalibrate who they're protecting—a single thematic pivot that transforms a straightforward revenge premise into something with real weight.