Dante (Dante de Noche) world première at Tribeca, 7 Jun 2026
Call a film Dante, and you raise certain expectations of a journey to the Underworld – which in a sense is what writer/director Hugo Ruíz’s feature delivers, given that it is set, like Ruíz’s previous feature One Night with Adela (2023), over a single night in Madrid, as a protagonist descends into a genre-fied netherspace of criminality and violence.
Dante opens with tough guy Mario Salava (Enrique Arce) racing his car through the streets at breakneck speed, when it flips over, leaving him grievously injured – but despite the blood gushing from a large hole in his neck and the fractured state of his ankle, he manages to limp back to his apartment, calling for a paramedic on the way (and lying on the phone about the severity of his condition). Bespectacled Eduardo (Chino Darin) duly arrives with his medical kit, and as he painfully treats Mario’s injuries, they are soon joined by sociopathic junkie Santo (Vicente Romero) and his cousin Maki (Ester Expósito), with Mario’s “fucking psychopath” brother Chemi (Asier Etxeandia) also on his way over.
“You know when there’s something everyone wants, but only you have it?” Santo says to Eduardo, “And the best part is no one knows what it is.” Indeed everyone here is chasing a mysterious MacGuffin which, like the contents of the briefcase in Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) or Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), is kept off screen apart from its golden glow and remains as much an enigma as a narrative engine. As these different gangsters show a willingness to hunt and kill each other for this whatsit, Eduardo is along for the ride, seeing up close a side of urban nightlife from which he is ordinarily excluded – even if we know from his current job, and from his ambition to work with the fire service, that walking on the wild side holds a certain attraction for him. Eduardo is now right at the edge, and likes it there – indeed his experiences might even provide fuel for his other amateur hobby. “You could make a film about everything that happened tonight,” Maki suggests, after noticing his interest in cameras. It is an oddly reflexive, metacinematic moment, given that we are ourselves watching something like the film that Maki proposes.
Young, meek mamma’s boy Eduardo – “a good guy”, in Maki’s words, devoted to a life of caring for others – wants (as he says repeatedly) only to get home to his mother, but increasingly he finds himself an involuntary tourist among volatile, violent characters in a chaotic clusterfuck of a situation from which there is little guarantee that he, or indeed anyone else, will emerge unscathed, let alone alive. And Dante certainly comes with a body count, and a lot of blood and gore to boot, as this long dark night of the soul weaves and feints its way through multiple tensions. Yet it reserves its biggest twist till the very end, where finally another reason is suggested for the title, and where we viewers are put in our uncomfortable place, Red Rooms-style, as rubbernecking consumers of these infernal misadventures.
strap: Hugo Ruíz’s one-night cross-city thriller tracks a paramedic’s descent as he witnesses Madrid’s moribund criminal underworld up close
© Anton Bitel
