The main character of Angel, teh paradmedic, is a very dark, brutal, calculating, and finally unhuman personae. Mario Casas personifies him by giving an impression of absoluteness, that is feeding his hatred of others, his inability to imagine a serene relationship with anyone, neither his fellow workers, nor his neighbor, nor the people who help him, and of course not his wife. After the accident that will leave him paralysed, it is obvious to the us, viewers, that the implacable outcome of this story can only be death. And we discover on the way that it can be darker than that. During the film we see this character becoming more and more despicable, resorting to the worst stratagems but still achieving his ends. The apprentice paramedic is despicable in the initial scenes in the ambualnce that set the scene; he is a detestable character from the very start. His wife, Vanessa, a rather simple and naive French girl (played with sensitivity by Deborah François) after doing her best, realizes the impossibility of changing her man, leaves him and telling what comes after would be a spoiler. She is actually too naive but no one can be on guard all the time or even imagine that the man with whom one has had a previous love affair is so different. The character is consistent and quite obnoxious from the first images - but one still has difficulty in imagining the horrors he will do. The setting shows a gloomy and rather deserted environment (the only real implausibility of the film is the absence of neighbours, except one poor guy). The colors, the way of filming the characters, the very few urban landscapes, accentuate a feeling of uneasiness from the beginning and build an atmosphere of suffocation. A very dark thriller, maybe also terrible to see because it appears plausible,
Review of The Paramedic
