‘Los Tigres’ San Sebastian Review: Alberto Rodríguez Explores the Perils of Life Underwater

They call him Tigre for a reason: experience, ferocity, the kind of authority that comes from decades underwater. Played with a stern, quietly magnetic presence by Antonio de la Torre, Tigre is an industrial diver working off the coast of Huelva, a seasoned veteran who knows every technical detail of his profession. His work isn’t romantic in the Jacques Cousteau sense; it’s heavy, industrial, tied to oil rigs and repairs. But when a crisis hits, he is the man everyone depends on. In Los Tigres, director Alberto Rodríguez (La isla mínima, Modelo 77) builds a suffocating drama with thriller overtones around this figure, a man both indispensable in his craft and profoundly flawed on land.

Tigre is joined by his sister, played with emotional sharpness by Bárbara Lennie. She has not the same amount of experience in the submarine world and struggles with a hearing problem, making her presence at once precarious and symbolic. Through her eyes, the audience gains access to this closed, highly technical environment. The film immerses us so deeply in the jargon and rhythms of industrial diving that even a Spanish viewer may find themselves disoriented—foreign audiences will certainly need subtitles, not only for the accents but for the specialized vocabulary that comes with the territory.

The crew around Tigre is a mix of types: a charismatic leader who keeps morale afloat, several green divers learning the ropes, and a handful of hardened men who put their lives—and their trust—in Tigre’s hands. Every descent into the murky depths feels perilous, each repair carrying the suggestion that not everyone will make it back alive. But what begins as a portrait of professional hazards soon reveals a darker undercurrent: a parallel operation involving drug trafficking, one that threatens to pull Tigre and his sister into a web of corruption and danger. It is at this point that the film pivots more decisively into thriller territory, intertwining suspense with revelations about the siblings’ past.

Rodríguez, however, is less interested in conventional crime plotting than in atmosphere. What lingers are the textures of this world—the camaraderie and rivalries of men working under crushing pressure, the claustrophobic dives captured in breathtaking underwater sequences, the precarious balance between life and death in an industry that rewards its laborers poorly while corporations reap vast profits. The director depicts this ecosystem with the same meticulous attention he brought to the marshlands of La isla mínima or the prison yards of Modelo 77: it’s a place where survival is a daily negotiation, and temptation is never far away.

At its heart, Los Tigres is a drama about family as much as it is about work. The bond between Tigre and his sister carries the film’s emotional weight, testing both their loyalty and their moral boundaries. Tigre may be unshakable beneath the surface, but on land he falters—he drinks too much, makes reckless choices, and cannot easily face the consequences of his past. His sister, in contrast, becomes the audience’s moral compass, struggling to reconcile the brutal realities of their trade with a more humane vision of life.

The tension between these threads—the visceral immediacy of the dives, the looming threat of criminal entanglement, and the intimate sibling drama—doesn’t always resolve into a seamless thriller. In fact, Rodríguez deliberately avoids turning Los Tigres into a formulaic suspense film. Instead, he offers something more nuanced: a story about a closed, masculine world, about skilled men who risk their lives daily only to be discarded by the petrochemical industry that exploits them.

Los Tigres may not roar as loudly as Rodríguez’s most celebrated films, but it has its own power. It plunges the viewer into an environment rarely explored on screen, mixing danger and melancholy, adrenaline and quiet despair. At once a character study, a workplace drama, and a moral fable, it shows that beneath the surface—whether under the sea or in the human soul—there are depths still waiting to be explored.