Perfect Strangers (2017)

"Perfect Strangers" arranges seven well-dressed Spaniards around a dinner table during a lunar eclipse and hands them a game: every incoming message and call gets shared aloud. It is a pressure cooker with place settings. The film, directed by Álex de la Iglesia, is a remake of the 2016 Italian original, and it carries that lineage without apology, transposing the same cruel architecture onto a Madrid dining room. What follows is a cascade of infidelities, evasions, and one genuinely wrenching reveal, all engineered with the precision of a stage farce.

The social consciousness on display is modest and mostly incidental. The ensemble is a homogeneous collection of white adults, and the only meaningful diversity arrives in the form of a closeted gay character whose secret becomes a narrative pivot in the third act. That thread supplies the film's one real jolt of progressive content, though it is handled as a plot mechanism, a bomb to be detonated, not a statement of casting philosophy. The women in the group are defined almost entirely by their marriages and their betrayals, and the script offers no structural critique of the arrangements it exposes. There is no racial dimension, no environmental concern, no economic argument, no meditation on the body. This is a film about phones and lies.

What remains is a talky chamber piece that moralizes about honesty and secrecy while trying to entertain. It unsettles more than it sermonizes. For viewers cataloguing cultural markers, the evening yields a thin harvest: one closeted character, a few unfaithful spouses, and a great deal of shouting in Spanish.