Tribeca Film Festival 2023: ONE NIGHT WITH ADELA

“Adela hasn’t had a good night!” a man with a harmonica sings as Adela (Laura Galán, Piggy) prepares a line of coke. She hasn’t, and it’s about to get worse. One Night with Adela, Spanish director Hugo Ruiz’s brash feature debut, is as straightforward as its title would suggest: Presented as a single long take, the film follows Adela, a garbage collector on a quest for vengeance against the world – or at least Madrid. She is a study of alienation we’ve seen before, a drug-addled Travis Bickle with a chip on her shoulder, and tonight she’s finally ready to let it all out. The film takes on the bleary rhythm of a night out gone sour, full of empty streets and the feral sounds of men looking for trouble past their bedtime. But, with the radio as her constant companion, Adela’s got some trouble of her own to make. 

Ambitious

Galán‘s performance has the force of a garbage truck at maximum velocity and it’s captivating to watch. Adela doesn’t do anything lightly: She doesn’t just get into her truck, she drags herself onto the seat; she doesn’t just snort coke, she positively gasps it up her nose; every breath she takes comes in huffs and puffs that practically fog up the screen, suggesting both her boundless rage and the soul-crushing weight of her effort.

The film lives and dies by Galán‘s performance, and she more than delivers. But Ruiz‘s audacious choice to tell the story as a long take has its drawbacks, particularly for a first time director – there’s a lot of empty space to fill between Adela’s acts of cruelty (of which there are, in my opinion, too few), and the film can drag for this reason, particularly in the first half. 

Still, Ruiz is stylistically ambitious here, and his confident directorial hand rightly earned him Tribeca’s Best New Narrative Director Award. He brings out strong performances from his small cast of insomniac city-dwellers, and where his cinematography both helps and occasionally hinders the story, the sonic landscape Ruiz creates adds a playful dimension – it unexpectedly turns the film into a quasi-jukebox musical, full of pop-punk tunes and the plaintive sounds of the talk radio station Adela treats as her own personal soapbox.

Ruiz‘s skills come together best in one scene in particular – an encounter between Adela and a male sex worker – that plays with expectations and perspective to really, fully deliver, for the only time in the film, on all the transgressive rage promised by the film’s bombastic style and tone. Beyond that, to provide even a perfunctory plot summary for One Night with Adela would detract from its shock-jockey stylings and leave only those long spaces in between. 

Conclusion

For its flaws, though, the film is an assured, often exciting directorial debut that’s not afraid to make audacious stylistic choices and lean into discomfort. One Night with Adela may be a bumpy ride, but it’s a wild one. I look forward to wherever Ruiz – and Galán, in her own projects – take us next.

Watch One Night with Adela