32 Malasana Street (2020)
Directed by Albert Pintó
No — 32 Malasana Street is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Madrid, 1976.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is entirely Spanish and ethnically homogeneous; no diversity-conscious casting is evident.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear in the film.
The film is a supernatural horror story with no feminist agenda or gender-ideological commentary.
Race and racial politics are not addressed; the story is set in a white Spanish context.
There is no environmental or climate-related content.
The 1976 political backdrop is atmospheric, not used for anti-capitalist or class-war messaging.
No body-positivity themes or body-image commentary are present.
No neurodivergence themes or characters are depicted.
The period setting is a horror backdrop, not a revisionist historical argument.
The film aims to scare rather than lecture; no preachy social messaging.
Why it received this score
Madrid, 1976. The Olmedo family arrives from the countryside with their grandfather, their suitcases, and their hopes, and settles into an apartment on Malasaña Street that has been waiting for them. The political turbulence of the moment rattles the windows and the radio, and the film treats it as wallpaper. That is not a complaint. A haunted apartment story does not owe us a thesis, and this one declines to supply one, content to let the era provide texture and the ghost provide the rest.
The ghost, as ghosts will, provides less than advertised. There are doors that open, mirrors that misbehave, a child who sees what others do not, and a Javier Botet-shaped silhouette doing the heavy lifting in the corridor. The screenplay, credited to four writers, moves through its stations with the efficiency of a commuter train, and the ending, by most accounts, derails somewhere short of the platform. Reviewers were unkind. The consensus, more or less, was that the scares came cheap and the metaphor went unexplored.
For our purposes, the ledger stays blank. The film has no interest in casting as statement, no argument about gender, no reckoning with race, no anxiety about the planet, no critique of capital dressed as a séance, and no sermon waiting at the end of the corridor. It wants to frighten us and nothing else. In that narrow ambition it is at least honest. We have sat through many pictures that wanted to frighten us and improve us at the same time. This is not one of them. It is a ghost story, and it knows it.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Malasaña neighborhood, Madrid, Spain, 1976. While political turmoil ravages the streets all over the country, the Olmedo family arrives in the big city and settles into their new apartment. They soon discover that they are not the only ones roaming its corridors.
Questions about 32 Malasana Street
Is 32 Malasana Street woke?
No — 32 Malasana Street is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does 32 Malasana Street have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does 32 Malasana Street compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #210 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.