‘The Redemption’ review: Daniel Guzman, Luis Tosar star in Madrid-set social drama

Dir/scr: Daniel Guzman. Spain/Romania. 2024. 115mins

An engrossing take on a small-time crook who finds himself out of his depth as he tries to prevent his grandmother from eviction, Daniel Guzman’s third feature follows his first two – Nothing In Return (2015) and Monkey Business (2022) – in being character-driven, warm-hearted and socially committed in the good, old-fashioned manner. New here are some noisy thriller elements: sometimes they threaten to pull the project out of shape but, courtesy of Guzman’s intense, downbeat central performance as the film’s flawed anti-hero, that never happens. The Redemption, which recently opened Malaga Film Festival, is always worthy, but never dull.

Always worthy, but never dull

Unemployed forty-something Lucas (Guzman) lives with, and cares for, his grandmother Antonia (octogenarian Rosario Garcia, making her debut). Money is tight and, on a hospital visit, Lucas steals and resells a defibrillator. Quickly picked up, arrested and jailed, his only concern is for Antonia, who can’t be left alone: after a bit of entertaining business involving self-harm and a friendly nurse, Mara (Susana Abaitua), Lucas escapes from the hospital.

Two key events mark Lucas’s passage through a plotline which is well-handled but sometimes feels too packed for its own good. One is that a letter arrives threatening to evict Antonia from their home unless she repays her large outstanding mortgage. (Such evictions have been a hot-button issue in Madrid over recent years, as buildings are repurposed for nakedly commercial ends.) 

The other is that an 11-year-old boy has died in the hospital because apparently the defibrillator Lucas has stolen was the only one available – a perhaps implausible detail in a script that so clearly prides itself on its faithfulness to lived experience. Other such credibility flaws threaten to break through as the busy plotline presses relentlessly and breathlessly on.

On the run, in need of a lot of cash and burdened with guilt, Lucas takes on work as a driver for a criminal gang, with Luis Tosar delivering his standard turn as the charismatic gang leader. “If the car doesn’t reach its destination or if the trunk is opened for any reason,” he warns Lucas in one memorable scene, “you’ll have a problem with no solution.” And as if he didn’t already have enough problems without solutions, Lucas decides, for reasons that he’s unclear about himself, that he must also seek out Gabriela (Itziar Ituño), the mother of the dead boy: the scenes between them are inevitably supercharged.

The film takes us through a satisfying range of moods and the script does well to marshal the sheer quantity of events taking place, but there’s always the troubling sense that things are about to spill over into the absurd. As the emotional centre, Guzman ties things down as the crumpled, resigned and engagingly non-charismatic Lucas, bringing real depth to the staple figure of the golden-hearted crook.

His grandmother, and the threatened home he shares with her, are the only positive elements in Lucas’ otherwise miserable existence, and his exchanges with Antonia – played with compelling naturalness by Garcia, who delivers some winningly comic one-liners – are the quietest and strongest scenes, crucially providing solid emotional justification for the insane, self-destructive lengths that Lucas goes to. After all, he’s on the horns of a dilemma of tragic proportions: in his attempts to preserve his own family, he has destroyed the life of someone else’s.

From its opening drone shots, The Redemption is a terrific homage to the barrios of Madrid – the cobbled streets, the local bars, the dingy working-class interiors, and the heartless institutions. (In typically Spanish fashion, one of the greatest obstacles Lucas faces is getting hold of Antonia’s account details so he can actually pay the money into the bank.) Ibon Antunano’s camerawork infuses the mood with an appropriately stifling and deadening air. Richard Skelton’s deliberately repetitive and simple minimalistic string score adds poignancy but is sometimes overused.