One Bad Night, One Good Thriller [Tribeca]

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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.

Dante 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.

Supposition works wonders, and the more Ruíz conceals about the three main players, the better. He shows, rather than tells, their storied histories without ever getting bogged down in backstory or melodrama as they race from crime scene to crime scene, avoiding Chemi and planning their escape (while Eduardo, unbeknownst to them, has exactly what they’re after).

Palpable tension and some positively swoon-worthy endgame wide shots will win over film geeks – despite the limited locales, Dante is gorgeously staged and shot, echoing early Spielberg, namely Duel, in how artistry transcends claustrophobic spaces and a small cast of characters. The carnage is audacious and shocking, yet it’s the burgeoning love story at the center, fighting against the odds, that will win over hearts.

Dante, predicated as it is upon augmenting the stakes, does get into an accident of its own, regressing arbitrarily into the demands of the subgenre to tack on one final twist that changes everything. The twist itself, in isolation, should work, but Ruíz doesn’t give it enough time to breathe. Thematically, it’s clear why the script pivots in that direction, and maybe upon a rewatch, it’ll land better than it did, but it reeks of checking genre boxes more than it feels like an organic, natural end to this chaotic, cloistered crime saga.

Fans of previous Tribeca Midnight fare – think The Seeding or You’ll Never Find Me– are going to eat Dante up. This is balls-to-the-wall kinetic filmmaking at its finest, a nasty, unforgiving thriller about our worst impulses and how desperate so many of us are for survival. There’s poignancy in the contemporary apathy at play, and Ruíz has filmed one hell of a tense thriller. Answer the Devil’s call and give Dante a go.

Tags: Dante Hugo Ruiz Tribeca 2026

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