‘Dante’ Review: One Bad Night, One Good Thriller [Tribeca]

Hugo Ruíz won the Best New Director Award at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival for his breakout, single-take thriller, One Night with Adela. The acclaimed filmmaker is back at the fest’s Midnight Section this year with his latest gonzo spectacle, Dante, and Ruíz more than lives up to his genre credos. Dante is foul, an odyssey into an underworld of crime and depravity alongside Spain’s midnight streets bursting with blood and tension. It’s an astonishing thriller let down only by an ending that arbitrarily endeavors to contextualize what came before without really earning it.

Dante opens with a car crash. Late-night paramedic Eduardo (Chino Darin) responds. Local crime boss, Mario (Enrique Arce), is shredded in his own apartment, and he demands Eduardo do whatever he can to save him. He’s bleeding out of every orifice, his leg is in shambles, and he’s on the brink of death. They’re interrupted by Maki (Ester Expósito) and Santo (Vicente Romero), two of Mario’s associates, at the door. Mario has absconded with something precious, and they’re keen to retrieve it. Panicked, Mario compels Eduardo to swallow the MacGuffin (we never see what it really is), eager to keep it out of their hands.

In the genre tradition of one-long-night cinema (think Run Sweetheart Run contemporarily, Run Lola Run traditionally), Eduardo is thrust into a battle of wits far beyond his means to manage. He’s at the mercy of Maki and Santo (playing into a sexy good cop, brutal bad cop dynamic) and Chemi (Asier Etxeandia), Mario’s largely off-screen brother who runs the whole syndicate.

is primarily predicated on escalation. From the moment Eduardo swallows the goods, Ruíz (who also wrote the script) ups the ante. It starts with a body being sliced open and ends with one of the most justified acts of cruelty I’ve seen in years. This is a putrid film that relishes in vicious people doing vicious things for the sake of survival, yet Ruíz still manages to find the bloody, beating heart beneath all the savagery. Expósito, in particular, channels Aubrey Plaza. She is deliciously deadpan, cruel in her own way without ever succumbing to archetypal gender roles, namely that the woman criminal has a kinder heart than all the men.