The Cold Light of Day

The plot is essentially primitive and the screenwriters didn’t dress up the dialogue in any kind of wit. What’s clever and funny is how the director deals with both of these aspects. The opening minutes prepare us for a light drama set in sunny Spain, where an overworked son will try to find his way to his authoritarian father. However, the narrative quickly takes a different direction with much sharper twists and we are suddenly watching a variation on a theme that Hitchcock had already seemingly exhausted – an innocent man on the run (nevertheless, the film sticks with family as the only certainty throughout its runtime). El Mechri doesn’t embellish this popular thriller formula, offering only realistic details during the chases through the streets of Madrid (the indestructibility of some of the characters ensures that the genre-flick pleasure is of the guilty variety) and mainly constant role reversals. The deliberately exaggerated involvement of the meaning-making devices of a particular genre (family drama, action, paranoid thriller) can give the impression that we are momentarily watching a slightly different film that is supposed to evoke in us a different emotional response than was desired a few minutes prior. As they were for Hitchcock, actors are for El Mechri only tools for manipulating viewers’ emotions. As he runs from people who want to kill him or violently extract from him information that he, like us, doesn't know, Will barely has time to use the toilet and tend to his wounds (which a woman has to do at the moment of his “pacification”), let alone carry on a longer dialogue. No time remains for delving deeper into psychology, which is only for the better. Everyone so suddenly transitions from one role to another that getting to know them better would only raise needless questions about the logic of what’s going on. The film contains several scenes when the hunted becomes the hunter in the course of a few moments. The characters are neither good nor bad, just highly adaptable. This is best seen in Will, who works his way up from the position of “I don’t know anything, I don’t know anyone, I don’t speak Spanish” to the moment when a single look is enough for us to understand how different his role is now. The constant unsettling of the viewer includes eliminating the romantic storyline by effectively making it impossible, rejecting the rules of the star system and the creation of a compassionate mood at unexpected moments (in accordance with the blurred line between the villains and the heroes). All at the same time, the director toys with the characters and our expectations without detracting from the craftsmanship, though he doesn’t have as much masterful control over that as he does over the narrative, or rather over the irresistibly devious concealing and revealing of information. Thanks, however, to those two incredibly well-thought-out scenes with mirrors, I can forgive him for the chaotic nature of the action scenes. The Cold Light of Day outwardly tempts us to immediately reject it as another dull action movie, but beneath its B-movie surface, it is actually the biggest genre surprise of the year so far. 85% (07/04/2012) (less) (more)