Albert Pintó’s Nowhere puts a pregnant woman in a shipping container and asks us to stay there with her. Mia, played by Anna Castillo, has escaped a country at war by hiding in a container aboard a cargo ship. A violent storm follows, and she gives birth while lost at sea. That is the whole pitch. It is a lean one, and the film works best when it trusts how lean it is.

The Spanish production is set in a dystopia, and its five credited screenwriters (Ernest Riera, Miguel Ruz, Indiana Lista, Seanne Winslow and Teresa Rosendoy) spend little time explaining it. What they do spend time on is stuff. The container is stocked with Tupperware, packaged earphones, flatscreen TVs, bottled vodka and hoodies, goods nobody on that ship was ever meant to need, and Mia has to find a use for every one of them. She also has a drill, some tape and a penknife she managed to save earlier. When she punctures the roof with the drill and the knife to get herself and the baby out of the rising water, the scene lands because we have watched her handle those tools for so long beforehand. Nothing in the film is set down without being picked up again later, and that discipline is the screenplay’s best habit.

Castillo carries almost everything. The script gives her very little company, so she has to make physical exhaustion, fear and stubbornness readable with almost no help from other people. The birth during the storm is the hinge of the film. Before it, Mia is a woman trying to get away. After it, she answers for someone who cannot look after herself, and Castillo plays that change as a narrowing of focus rather than a swell of heroism. There is no triumph in her face, only the look of a person doing the next necessary thing because nothing else is on offer. It is a controlled, unshowy performance, and the film leans on it more than on any single image.

Tamar Novas plays Nico, and his scenes are mostly telephone calls, his voice reaching Mia while she is stranded on the water. They give the film its only human contact, and they are also where it strains hardest. That a phone keeps connecting on a drifting container is a convenience you have to agree to ignore, and the timing of the calls often feels chosen by the screenplay rather than by circumstance. Novas does what he can with limited material. The conversations are affecting, though I never quite stopped noticing the machinery behind them.

There is a second thread: the daughter Mia has already lost, Uma, who surfaces in Mia’s delusions as her body gives out. It gives the survival plot some weight beyond the mechanics of staying alive, and it helps that the film does not dwell on it. Still, the backstory and the political premise, a government that treats its own citizens as a problem of supply, remain a backdrop. We are told about the tyranny rather than shown it, and once Mia is on the water it fades almost completely. If the film wanted to say something about a society that discards the vulnerable, it says it quickly and moves on. That is a missed chance, because the idea of a mother fleeing a state that counts her child as surplus is the strongest thing the script has.

Pacing is the larger problem. A story confined to a container and then to open water has little room to vary its rhythm, and Pintó does not always find a way around that. Stretches of Mia drifting can feel repeated rather than escalated, so tension that should rise holds level instead. At roughly 109 minutes the film is not excessive, yet it is long enough for the sameness to register. The sentimental moments also lean toward melodrama, especially when a phone call arrives at the point where the story already has the audience’s sympathy.

What keeps the film watchable is its refusal to pad the premise with twists. The danger is simple and constant: water, hunger, a newborn, a body running down. Mia solves one problem and the next appears. The film is honest about that cycle, even when it tires you out.

Nowhere is a rough, uneven and sometimes manipulative survival thriller, but it has more going for it than its flaws would suggest. Its logic of cause and effect is clear, its lead is stronger than the script around her, and its best sequences get a surprising amount of tension out of a single steel box. I would not call it essential. I would still recommend it to anyone who likes watching one person work a problem to the end.