One Night with Adela (2023) Film Review – Vengeance & Atonement in a One Shot Film

Posted on by Michael Williams

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Hugo Ruíz’s debut film, the brutal and unflinching One Night with Adela [Una noche con Adela] (2023), is far more than a simple revenge thriller; it is an indictment of Spain’s generational trauma stemming from the institutionalized sins of infant abduction. Following a single, wrath-fueled night, the film presents a gut-wrenching, 21st-century Taxi Driver–esque story, focusing on Adela, a disaffected sanitation worker driven to settle a deep-seated grudge against a world that has systematically undervalued and abused her. Anchoring this slow-burning nightmare is a legendary performance by Laura Galán, cementing her status as a fearless talent following her turn in Piggy (2022).

Over One Night with Adela‘s 105 minutes, writer-director Hugo Ruíz’s camera relentlessly focuses on Adela with one long, unbroken shot. Adela is a sanitation worker who, as she completes her shift, begins a drug-fueled bender of rage and violence across the orange sodium-lit streets of Madrid, seeking to right the wrongs life has dealt her. Starting with the murder of a cat-calling passerby who attempts to rob her and ending with the painful confrontation with her adoptive parents, Adela’s every movement and expression is exquisitely recorded by Ruiz’s fluid single-shot camera work. Centered thus, Galán’s performance superbly illustrates Adela’s powerful rage in every expression, every groan and movement—whether she’s climbing in and out of her truck, striding down the sidewalk, or lasciviously dancing in front of her mortified, captive audience. 

In an industry that consistently prioritizes flawless female aesthetics, Laura Galán’s performance is a fearless act of defiance, as she displays her unconventional body, scars and all. This defiance culminates in one of the movie’s most shocking scenes: an explicit sexual encounter with a male prostitute, where Ruiz reveals Adela’s true victims. The intimate, erotic moment quickly turns horrific as the camera swings to the heretofore unknown, bound and gagged captives forced to witness the performance.

Spanish horror has long been a fount of exceptional, critical cinema. In the Francoist era, films like Chicho Ibáñez Serrador’s The House that Screamed (1969) and Jorge Grau’s The Legend of Blood Castle (1973) often used the genre as a safe and indirect way to criticize the status quo and explore the moral corruption of the regime.

After Franco’s death and the subsequent relaxing of censorship, Spanish horror quickly became known for its cutting-edge gruesomeness and unique aesthetic, with movies like Amando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s dynamic found-footage [REC] (2007-2014) series. This rich history provides a compelling backdrop for One Night with Adela, which continues the tradition of using intense mood and stark visuals, particularly its unsettling burnt orange colored streets, to exhume and expose national trauma.

The theme of confession and penance runs deeply through One Night with Adela. The film’s narrative revolves around Adela’s many on-air dialogues with Gemma, a late-night radio host who acts as her makeshift confessor. In the final act, during a long dialogue, Gemma and Adela discuss the role of Confession, one of the Catholic Church’s Seven Sacraments whose purpose, among other things, is to provide spiritual healing from the effects of sin.

This act, Adela reveals to Gemma, is her goal for the night: the final stage of which is penance, a form of self-punishment or hardship performed to show sorrow for wrongdoing. “It’s time for penance,” she says before ending her call. What follows is a thoroughly gripping monologue Adela delivers to her adoptive parents, the bound victims, who have been forced to witness Adela’s actions. She lays out the sins they have inflicted on her, from being stolen from her birth parents to being kicked out of the house for having a mixed-race boyfriend. “I blame you for turning me into a human wreck,” she tells them, quoting a priest from her childhood. Ensuring the penance she brought to her adoptive parents has begun,  she offers a final, chilling invocation from the Gospel of Luke: “Faith doesn’t make things easy, it makes them possible.”

One Night with Adela is a harrowing experience made profoundly impactful by its single-shot format and Laura Galán’s darkly vibrant performance. The audience doesn’t merely witness Adela’s actions; through the claustrophobic filmmaking and Galán’s visceral portrayal, we are invited to feel her raw rage and alienation on a truly deep-seated level, making us all complicit in her journey. This is a powerful, demanding film that uses its unique structure and unflinching thematic focus to exhume the spiritual harm of institutional trauma, cementing Hugo Ruíz’s debut as a necessary and unforgettable piece of modern Spanish cinema.

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One Night with Adela (2025) is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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