Julia (Carmen Maura) is a middle-aged woman working a temp job showing properties she'd never be able to afford. Ricardo (Jesús Bonilla), her husband, is trying to hold down a door gig at a disco and has all but given up and become a fount of toxicity and self-pity. Ah, the joys of late stages capitalism - at least a quarter of a century, and no end in sight.
When she's sent to show a beautiful, fully furnished flat in the middle of Madrid to prospective buyers, Julia decides to invite her hubby there and spend a few stolen nights of high living while it's unoccupied; But her plans to rekindle things with Ricardo is interrupted when a crack in the ceiling spills stagnant water and bugs on them, souring their foreplay and eventually leading to a big fight.
Julia ends up alone in the flat, and the next day she's there when the fire brigade breaks into the apartment above the one she's staying at. They discover the corpse of an old man, and a mysterious scribble. Later, when she's alone, Julia uses it to find a few bags holding a minor fortune squirrelled away in the derelict apartment; Life-changing money.
The catch is that the rest of the building's tenants, led by the superintendent (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) had been patiently waiting for the old man to croak to get that money - and they won't let this new interloper to steal what they see as theirs. When subterfuge fails, their attempts become more violent... and Julia's escape more fraught.
Breakout hits don't come out much better than Álex de la Iglesia's La Comunidad, in which the prickly Basque director, famous for bleakly funny genre films, fused the pitch-black comedy of his previous effort (Muertos de Risa) with a heavy dose of Hitchcockian suspense to tremendous effect. It's a gorgeous movie, something that becomes immediately apparent with the first shot of the movie as the cameras zoom from street level to the top of a building to follow a cat as it goes inside to eat a little of its former owner (Cinematography: Kiko de la Rica). Later set pieces are exquisitely staged, from a party that freezes whenever Julia is not in the room to a rooftop chase that finds the time to lovingly spoof The Matrix while homaging Vertigo.
The script, which the director wrote with regular collaborator Jorge Guerricaechevarría, is a precisely calibrated cocktail of farce, suspense, and pure misanthropy with solid jokes that range from gallows humour to near non-sequiturs. All the actors are fully committed and are clearly having a blast, too; None more than Moura, who fully inhabits a complex character at a complicated moment in her life while still managing to be hilarious.
This is not my favourite de la Iglesia film (my preference for his work roughly follows the order in which the movies were released), but it's easily his most accessible, and one of his most visually sumptuous. Very highly recommended.
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