The Paramedic (2020)

The Paramedic arrives from Spain by way of Netflix, a 2020 psychological thriller in which Mario Casas plays Ángel, a paramedic who steals from the patients he is meant to be saving and bullies his girlfriend Vane with a dedication that borders on the professional. When an ambulance crash leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, the film treats his wheelchair as an instrument of menace, a prop for stalking and confinement. The disability is played by an able-bodied actor and functions as a villain's accessory, which spares us any representational uplift. The Spanish cast is uniformly European. There is nothing here for the casting directors of the cultural moment to celebrate.

The abuse material is the film's engine. Ángel spies on Vane's phone, questions her fertility, and eventually drugs, gags, and binds her to a bed while he murders a neighbor and her new partner. Vane does escape, and she does stab him down a stairwell, and the final image of her wheeling a mute, fully paralyzed Ángel from the hospital carries a certain grim satisfaction for anyone who has followed the arc. But the camera is far more interested in Ángel's pathology than in her interior life. The story is a study of a sociopath, not a thesis on gender. This is the sort of abuse narrative that predates the current cultural vocabulary by several decades, and it has not been retrofitted.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. No racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no critique of the health care economy despite a protagonist who loots ambulances for a living. His thievery is presented as appetite, not as commentary. There is no lecture, no message, no sermon, just a competent, nasty genre piece that Rotten Tomatoes has settled at fifty percent. The film does not wish to teach us anything. It wishes to unsettle us, and it succeeds just often enough to justify the classification exercise.