‘Collision Course’ Netflix Review: A Spanish Crime Puzzle That Rewards Anyone Willing to Surrender to Its Game of Deception
In Netflix’s Spanish thriller, Luis Zahera plays a bank manager held up by four masked robbers (Laia Costa, Tamar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes and Karra Elejalde) whose getaway ends in a crash that splinters the story into competing versions.
This twisty, inventive and somewhat hard-to-define Spanish thriller can best be understood as a narrative exercise. Packed with twists, reversals and carefully engineered confusion, it seems to draw on several interconnected ideas. A little Rashomon, a bit of The Usual Suspects and a concept out of Sliding Doors make up a combination that will fascinate fans of crime thrillers in which you are never quite sure where you stand.
On the surface, the story revolves around a bank robbery in Madrid in 2013, shortly after the economic collapse that wiped out the savings of a large part of the population and the subsequent government bailout of the banks. We see Ernesto (Luis Zahera), a bank manager, being held at gunpoint in his branch by a gang of four masked robbers who break into the safety deposit boxes to steal one in particular, only to find it empty. They leave with money from other boxes, but are hardly satisfied with the haul. During their getaway, amid mounting arguments, their car is spectacularly hit by another vehicle and flips over.
Even revealing the bare minimum about what happens next could qualify as a spoiler for some viewers, so anyone who hasn’t seen the film might want to skip the following paragraph.
At this point, the film proposes a game in which viewers are invited to imagine different versions of events depending on the possible outcomes of that accident. The one constant across all of them is the group of robbers. The catch is that Carla (Laia Costa), Tomás (Tamar Novas), Raúl (Álvaro Cervantes) and Pedro (Karra Elejalde) are — or were, in Pedro’s case — also police officers. This puts them on both sides of the crime, as investigators and suspects, each trying to cover up or conceal their own tracks. But just when you think you have a reasonably clear idea of where Colisión is heading, the screenplay turns in on itself to tell another version of the same story.
Clever and intricately constructed, Collision Course can initially be somewhat confusing, largely because of the way Sánchez-Arévalo plays with narrative time and editing, cutting back and forth between the investigators and the criminals. Gradually, however, the story begins to fall into place, the narrative gaps are filled in, and the different pieces of the puzzle start to reveal how they fit together. Or at least they do until the screenplay decides to take another sharp turn and reframe the story from a different perspective.
Colisión unfolds in terms of possibilities, placing viewers in something like a «choose your own adventure» scenario, albeit one entirely orchestrated by the screenwriter and director. Despite the differences between each perspective, certain things remain clear in every version: the consequences of banking fraud and the damage it inflicted on ordinary people; the corruption of bankers and businessmen; and the romantic and family tensions that emerge among the characters as a result of the robbery, both before and after it takes place.
The robbery itself lasts no more than five minutes at the beginning of the film. What follows is primarily a story about the various threads that led up to it — always more numerous and tangled than they initially appear — and those that, after an accident brings the robbers’ escape to an abrupt halt, gradually begin to unravel, with all the surprises, betrayals and other familiar ingredients of the genre. What sets Collision Course apart from other thrillers about robberies and their aftermath is, more than anything else, the hypothetical nature of each version of events.
It’s true that this approach can give the film a somewhat less definitive quality, since anything may or may not have happened depending on the twists and turns of each version. But if you surrender to the system Colisión proposes, that hardly becomes a problem. In that sense, the film plays like a game, a kind of chess match between its creators and the audience, in which every move made by one side demands a response from the other. In cinema, of course, only the filmmakers get to move the pieces, so the playing field is never really level. Those willing to go along with the invitation will enjoy this game of deception layered upon deception.
