The Fury of a Patient Man (Raúl Arévalo, 2016) Spain

Reviewed by Gustav Arndal. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

The first act of this movie is a slow, methodical mood piece in which the audience gradually pieces together who everyone is and what is about to happen. The rest is an intimate suspense thriller with some killer performances and a whole lot of violence. Both parts are great.

José (Antonio de la Torre) is a quiet, reserved man hiding a dark past. Years ago, a robbery ended with his father in the hospital and his girlfriend killed. Now he has infiltrated the inner circle of the getaway driver, the only man who got caught, who will soon be released.

José spends his free time brooding in his apartment and replaying the tape of his love being beaten to death. And once Curro (Luis Callejo) gets released, José’s revenge begins.

While it contains elements of action and film noir, it plays more like a western, with the American plains replaced by Spanish countryside and the revolvers replaced with one shotgun and many sharp objects. José plays the cowboy taking the law into his own hands to exact revenge on criminals in hiding. Antonio plays the role quietly and with intensity, a man of action rather than talk, though it’s at times hard to distinguish his brooding and thinking from his rage.

The supporting cast do some great work, especially noteworthy is Ruth Díaz as Ana, Curro’s unhappy wife. Her character gets relegated to the sidelines while the men make the decisions, but Ruth manages to bring out a sympathetic, independent and flawed woman from a relatively small role.

Luis Callejo does a fine job as Curro, who is forced to help José in his rampage out of fear for his and his family’s life. The two form a tense duo, at once working together to evade suspicion and plotting against each other on a violent road trip across Spain.

The real star of the film is the script. The story evolves seamlessly from a drama about a family at the edge of society to a gratifying revenge film and ends with a bitter, gut-wrenching finale. While José starts off a sympathetic anti-hero killing murderers and drug dealers, he crosses line after line until it becomes clear that he’s too deeply broken and blinded by lust for revenge to think clearly about his actions.

There are some neat details that add to the realism beyond the grounded camera and natural lighting. Chief among them is the use of cell phones. A lot of thrillers and intimate dramas that rely on managing what information characters have access to have to find an excuse for phones not to work (the classic “no signal here” from horror films) or set the film some decades in the past. But here, the cell phones are used effectively as information tools and add to the story rather than distract from it.

It’s a small thing, but it’s not something to take for granted. With a tight script, some well written characters and tense, violent sequences, The Fury of a Patient Man may be heartless and brutal, but it’s calculated and smart. A requirement for any good revenge thriller.

[image taken from imdb]