Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance split one young man’s life three ways depending on whether he caught a train, and Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run gave its heroine three sprints at the same rescue. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo‘s Collision Course takes that forking-path machinery to a Madrid bank job, then rigs the game: whichever branch you follow, the stones the crew came for were never worth the blood. Spoilers for every version follow.

Pedro (Karra Elejalde) is a retired police officer; his son Raúl (Álvaro Cervantes), Carla (Laia Costa) and Tomás (Tamar Novas) are serving officers. Their inside man is Ernesto (Luis Zahera), the branch manager who planned the robbery. The getaway car crashes, and the film keeps rewinding to that crash: one version for each gang member who dies, and a final one where nobody does.

When Pedro dies, police identify him from the serial number on his prosthesis, and Raúl’s grief curdles into panic until he shoots Tomás. When Raúl dies, Pedro refuses to burn the car so the boy’s mother can bury him, and the trail leads to the father, undone by the print of his old regulation boot in dog mess outside the bank. When Carla dies, detective Luis (Lluís Homar) tells Tomás she was pregnant; convinced the child was Raúl’s, he kills Raúl, then Pedro.

Only the version in which Tomás dies runs to the end, and it lays the con bare. Pedro had quietly pocketed the diamonds from box 34; a pawnbroker tells him they are fakes. Their owner had insured them for five million euros and swapped them before the robbery to collect the payout, with Ernesto in on it. Lola, the café waitress who swallows the stones to smuggle them abroad, boards a different flight to punish the bank that ruined her brother, only to learn from Ernesto that hers are fakes too. He flies to Bangkok with the real ones, while Pedro, Carla and Raúl are arrested.

Then the film returns to the crash one last time. No one dies. The four torch the car, take another and drive off together. In the back seat, Raúl and Carla trade a smile. At the wheel, Tomás complains about the smell, and Pedro tells him to get used to it.

That smell is the dog mess on Pedro’s boot, the same print that put him in a cell when his son died. The smile is the affair that turned Tomás into a killer when Carla died. And whatever they carried out of box 34 was fake before anyone pulled on a mask. The fifth version is not the reward for sitting through the other four; it is all of them, paused minutes before they go off.

The setting sharpens the point. The story unfolds in 2013, in the hangover of Spain’s financial crisis, and Pedro joined the job after a yen-denominated mortgage wiped out his savings. Kieślowski’s branches turned on chance; Sánchez Arévalo’s turn on who already owns the stones.

The director made his name on warm family comedies like Primos and La gran familia española, and his first thriller closes on the kind of line a father mutters on a long drive: an old cop telling the man at the wheel to get used to the smell.

Tags: Netflix, Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Collision Course, Laia Costa, Karra Elejalde, ending explained