A director who built his name on the tenderness of families under strain has walked into a bank with a very different intention. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, the writer-director of AzulOscuroCasiNegro and La gran familia española, has made his first thriller, and he has made it as a chamber piece — a robbery that stops being a robbery the moment you look closely at the people carrying it out.

Collision Course, released in Spain as Colisión, is a Netflix film set in the middle of an economic crisis. A group of robbers breaks into a bank in Madrid, and what begins as a straightforward job curdles into something else: a game of deception, fear and survival in which everyone in the room is trying to escape something larger than a prison sentence. Netflix has been unusually candid about the film’s own trick in its first materials — no one here is exactly who they claim to be.

For Sánchez Arévalo this is a genuine change of register, and that is the first reason to pay attention. His filmography reads as a long study of families and the people who almost belong to them: the grief-stricken brothers of his 2006 debut, the misfits of Primos, the weight-loss group of Gordos, the runaway teenager of Diecisiete. He is a filmmaker who has always trusted conversation over incident. The move into genre came, by his own account, from a proposal by Ramón Campos to try a different kind of story, and the interesting question is not whether a heist can hold him but what a writer this attentive to dialogue does with a form that usually runs on plot mechanics.

There is a small irony in the title. A director whose career has been about the frictions that pull families together and apart calls his first genre film Colisión — and points it at strangers thrown into the same room by circumstance rather than blood. Whether that is deliberate or convenient, it fits the shape of the story he has described: not a plan executed cleanly but bodies and interests hitting one another until something breaks. The English-market title, Collision Course, keeps the sense of an impact everyone can see coming and no one can stop.

Because a thriller is never really about the plot. It is about a specific fear, and the fear this premise names is not the gun on the counter but the ground giving way beneath ordinary lives. Setting the crime inside an economic crisis puts the bank — the exact institution a Spanish audience has learned to distrust — at the centre of the frame, and it swaps the caper’s glamour for desperation. The announced conceit, that the people in the room are performing versions of themselves, suggests a film built less on where the money goes than on who is lying to whom, and when the lie becomes impossible to keep up.

That is a structure a dramatist would recognise. Confine the action to one location and the robbery turns into a stage; information — who knows what, who is bluffing, who has misread the person beside them — becomes the real engine. It is the logic of the Spanish confinement thriller, of Celda 211 and the twist architecture of Contratiempo, more than the logic of the elaborate score. The premise points that way even before a single scene is seen; whether the execution honours it is exactly what the premiere will settle.

The casting reads like a director assembling an ensemble for a play rather than a crew for an action piece. Laia Costa, who carried the single-take Victoria and won a Goya for Cinco lobitos, is an actor who works in close, unshowy registers. Luis Zahera arrives with the sharpest crime pedigree in current Spanish cinema after El reino and As bestas, both for Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Karra Elejalde brings the gravity he has lent everything from También la lluvia to Mientras dure la guerra; Tamar Novas has been a fixture since Mar adentro; Álvaro Cervantes rounds out the younger edge of the group. And there is Lluís Homar — a stage veteran who now runs Spain’s Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico — whose presence alone signals a film interested in performance as a subject, not just a tool.

That interest is the throughline. A cast weighted toward theatre and toward actors known for interior work is the clearest hint of what Sánchez Arévalo is after: a heist where the tension is generated by faces holding something back, by people managing what others are allowed to see. The Spanish reference the marketing invites is La casa de papel, and audiences will reach for it first. The truer lineage runs elsewhere — to the confinement drama and to the moral-rot crime cinema of El reino, where the question is never how the plan works but what the plan reveals about the people willing to run it.

The production frame matters too. Colisión is made by Bambú Producciones, the company Ramón Campos and Teresa Fernández-Valdés built into one of Spain’s most exportable studios with Gran Hotel, Las chicas del cable and Fariña. Pairing that industrial muscle with an auteur known for small, character-first films is its own kind of bet: that a filmmaker can deliver a genre piece for a global platform without surrendering the thing that made his work worth watching in the first place. Netflix has backed the wager as a direct-to-streaming original, skipping cinemas entirely.

The bet is not made in a vacuum. Spain has become one of Netflix’s most productive non-English suppliers, and the platform’s Madrid production hub has turned local genre into a global export — a pipeline La casa de papel opened and titles from Las chicas del cable to a steady run of Spanish thrillers have kept flowing. What Colisión adds to that catalogue is authorship of a particular kind: not a room of anonymous craftspeople delivering to a format, but a filmmaker with a recognisable set of preoccupations being handed a genre and asked to make it his. The value for the platform is precisely the friction between the two — a character study wearing the clothes of a heist.

Una mujer con chaqueta de cuero camina ante un cordón policial en una calle de Madrid en Collision Course — Photo: Netflix

What the film cannot answer in advance — and may choose not to answer at all — is the question its own logline plants. If no one in that bank is who they say, then the recovered money, the arrests, the escape, whichever way it lands, cannot settle whether anyone in the room was ever telling the truth about who they are. That is the friction a good deception thriller leaves ringing after the plot has tied itself off, and it is the one thing a heist’s resolution is structurally unable to resolve.

Collision Course (Colisión) premieres on Netflix on 30 October 2026, arriving worldwide as a direct-to-streaming release with no theatrical window. It was shot across Madrid in late 2025, directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo from a screenplay written with Ramón Campos, and produced by Bambú Producciones, with Laia Costa, Karra Elejalde, Luis Zahera, Tamar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes and Lluís Homar.