Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Hugo Ruiz
Starring: Laura Galán, Jimmy Barnatán, Litus, Raudel Raúl, Rosalía Omil, Fernando Moraleda,
Beatriz Morandeira, Gemma Nierga
Hitchcock famously described drama as "life with the dull bits cut out."
The recent wave of movies shot in a single unbroken take (some genuine,
some manipulated to appear so) have largely ignored this definition.
Refusing to cut often means the dull bits are left intact, and a badly
constructed single take movie will leave the viewer pointlessly watching a
character walk from one point to another for much of its running time.
Hitchcock of course made his own single take movie with Rope, but he constructed it in a manner that meant the camera was always in a
place that moved the story along.
Writer/director Hugo Ruiz's single take thriller
One Night with Adela heavily features a talk radio host, but
it ironically contains a lot of what might be considered the cinematic
equivalent of dead air, moments, or more like minutes, where the viewer is
left to twiddle their thumbs as the camera and protagonist move from one
point to the next (these are often accompanied by some annoying Spanish
rock tunes). It's practically a short that has been stretched to feature
length by having its central character do a whole lot of walking and
driving.
That central figure is our anti-heroine Adela (Laura Galán). The
movie opens as she finishes her night shift cleaning the deserted streets
of Madrid. We watch as she takes a large wad of money from an ATM before
said cash is removed from her person by a potential rapist who decides to
turn mugger instead when he finds the money on Adela's person. She's not
about to let him get away with his crime however, and in minutes he's
lying dead in an alleyway.
If you think this is the inciting incident for the ensuing narrative,
think again. Adela's killing of her attacker has practically no connection
to what follows. For the next hour we're left to watch as Adela drives
around the city, popping into a friends' home to buy some drugs before
calling into a late night radio talk show. She tells the host (Spanish
radio personality Gemma Nierga) that she plans to kill some
people later that night, and it's clear that she feels someone has wronged
her.
One Night with Adela hangs heavily on what amounts to little
more than a filmmaking gimmick, but there's very little visual
storytelling employed. Almost everything we learn about Adela is literally
told to us through her interactions with the radio host. The first hour of
the movie consists of Adela telling us what she plans to do that night,
while for the closing 45 minutes she tells us why she has made such
chilling plans. There is however one key visual reveal, and boy is it a
doozy. I'm not going to spoil it for you but it's depraved enough to make
the likes of Gaspar Noe and Lars von Trier jealous that they didn't
conceive such an idea. Sadly, just as we think this is going to kick the
film into gear, it all falls apart again as we're forced to listen to
Adela rambling on about her troubles for the remainder of the film.
Galán, who caught the attention of genre fans with her breakout turn in
the dark thriller
Piggy, certainly gives a committed performance here, one that is as athletic
as it is artistic, given how much physical movement she's forced to do to
pull off the unbroken take conceit. But Galán often seems to be lacking
direction, particularly in the lengthy sequences in which she's simply
walking or driving, and her performance too often lapses into a one-note
snarl. At times she's not even on the screen, with Ruiz leaving us in an
empty living room for several minutes as she showers offscreen, or in the
cab of her garbage truck as she pops into a late night store to buy some
cigarettes. Modern technology has given filmmakers the power to film
single take movies in a way previous generations simply couldn't, but like
the found footage fad, it's a technique that's rapidly growing stale
through lack of innovation.
