The Corpse of Anna Fritz (2015)

The Corpse of Anna Fritz arrives from Spain with a premise that would clear a room at any festival panel: a morgue orderly, two friends, a dead actress, and a decision that curdles into murder. Hèctor Hernández Vicens directs his seventy-six minutes with the grim efficiency of a man who knows exactly what he is selling, and what he is selling is discomfort. There is no message tucked beneath the sheet. No lesson waits in the corridor. The film simply proceeds, and we watch.

For those of us who catalogue the cultural temperature of a release, this one registers as a blank instrument. The cast is a small Spanish ensemble, assembled for the job at hand, with no representational architecture to speak of. The story concerns violence done to a woman's body, and it treats that violence as grist for suspense, not as material for a thesis. There is no feminist reckoning here, no racial or economic subtext, no climate anxiety, no affirmation of any body, no neurodivergent interiority, no revisionist claim about the past. The men are predators because the script needs predators. Their motives are appetite and self-preservation, nothing grander.

What remains is craft and shock, and the film is honest about both. Alba Ribas spends much of the runtime motionless, then spends the finale with a knife, and the turn lands because the movie has earned its ugliness without pretending it is anything else. Critics at the time found the whole thing thin, and they were not wrong. There is, however, a certain integrity in a thriller that refuses to flatter its audience with meaning. It offers seventy-six minutes of dread, a body, and a moral vacuum, then ends. We score it accordingly, and we move on.