Daniel Calparsoro
El aviso

This Spanish supernatural thriller is truly unique. To be honest, the premise perhaps says more than the actual development of the story, which loses some momentum along the way and possibly concludes in a less satisfying manner than one might have hoped. However, this symbolic and revealing ending comes unexpectedly and is still worth watching all the way through, because otherwise, one would not have a complete picture of the situation essential to understand every single moment of the film.

An introduction that might discourage more or less interested viewers, but I would tell you that stepping back from a story like the one told in this film titled "El aviso" (2018) would be, to stay on theme, at least criminal. The story? Let's say that at the start of the film, there's a shooting that takes place right before the eyes of Jon (played by the talented Raul Arevalo), who is the main protagonist of the film's events. If not the "only" one, but explaining why would truly be too much and too complicated. Nonetheless, you should know that Jon is a brilliant mathematician, a mind as genius as it is sensitive, who suffers from schizophrenia and hallucinatory visions that align with the supernatural. After the aforementioned episode, Jon investigates intuitively and obsessively on numerical sequences behind which lies a mysterious story, forcing him to travel back in time as well as project himself ten years into the future.

The story then proceeds by narrating in parallel the events that occur at a ten-year distance from each other, except for specific flashbacks to the past, and with great skill from director Daniel Calparsoro (who here adapts a story from the novel of the same name by Paul Pen) who portrays and projects on the screen an engaging story that captivates and leaves you breathless until the end. As I mentioned, there's a bit of regret on my part because I would have preferred different developments that I wouldn't even know how to hypothesize, but perhaps my disappointment lies more in the considerations of the intervention of the supernatural, a component that doesn't always convince me and here ultimately prevails over mathematics and science. Unless you want to finally believe that after all, these too are part of something akin to alchemical formulas linked to witchcraft and higher manifestations. And maybe it is so, in view of the infinity of numbers, even if it's true that if you want to know about science, forget about necromancers and turn to a real scientist. Even here, after all, they resort to a mathematician to unravel the situation, and one can't just become a mathematician by chance; you have to actually earn that degree in the end.