A man in mirror-lensed aviators jabs both index fingers at a thicket of microphones, grinning under a wall of red posters that carry his own moustached face. The banner behind him reads VOTA; beneath it sits the name of a long-gone crooner, VIVA EL FARY. José Luis Torrente — the broke, bigoted, chain-smoking, freeloading ex-cop who has spent a quarter-century failing his way through five movies — has finally found an institution crude enough to have him: the ballot box.

Torrente has never really been a man. Since 1998 he has worked as a diagnosis, the snoring, sexist, nostalgic id of a particular Spain that the country would rather laugh at than name aloud. Santiago Segura, who writes the films, directs them, and disappears into the prosthetic gut and the aviators, built the most commercially successful comedy franchise in Spanish history on that single flash of recognition. The new installment is a political satire: Torrente founds a populist party called Nox and runs for office. The premise does one clean thing — it turns the camera around. The joke is no longer what Torrente will steal from the people around him, but who, exactly, would put him in charge.

That inversion is sharper than it looks, and it is sharper than anything the franchise tried before. The earlier films were heists in disguise — a property scam in Marbella, a casino caper in a fictional Eurovegas — plots that kept the grotesque busy chasing money. Dropping that same fixed character onto a campaign trail places him in the one arena specifically built to flatter the people watching it. An election is a machine for telling a population what it wants to hear, and Torrente is a man with no filter between appetite and speech. The collision is the film.

Segura stages it as permanent-campaign spectacle rather than plot: rallies, debate-stage close-ups, bus tours, slogans, and a deep supporting bench of comedians, trap musicians and television personalities playing the carnival that forms around any modern candidate. The casting is the craft signature. Fernando Esteso, the veteran face of 1970s landismo comedy, walks in like a relic carried from an older and equally vulgar strain of Spanish cinema; Carlos Areces and Gabino Diego, mainstays of the contemporary comedy scene, fill the frame around him. The texture of the movie is the Spanish celebrity ecosystem itself, repurposed as electoral set-dressing.

None of this would matter commercially if Segura were not, by himself, an industrial fact of Spanish cinema. He runs two registers at once. One is wholesome and familial — the Padre no hay más que uno comedies that fill multiplexes at Christmas — and the other is the Torrente grotesque, the id to that ego. Between them they bracket the entire mainstream of Spanish commercial filmmaking, and they explain how a sixth entry in a vulgar franchise opened bigger than any domestic release in roughly fifteen years. The audience was not surprised by Torrente. It was waiting for him.

That choice points at the film’s real subject, which is not Torrente at all but the tradition he comes from. Spain has a long, distinguished habit of laughing at power from below. Luis García Berlanga turned an election-season hunting party into a portrait of national rot in La escopeta nacional, and made an executioner pitiable in El verdugo. Further back, Ramón del Valle-Inclán named the grotesque mirror the esperpento — deliberate distortion as the only honest way to render a deformed country. Torrente is that lineage stripped of its literary alibi and handed a campaign sash. He does not analyze the system from a safe distance; he embodies its worst instincts and waits to see whether the audience keeps cheering.

What has changed in the twelve years since the last film is the world around the joke. The early Torrente movies arrived in years of property booms and busts, when the grift was financial and the satire mostly local. This one lands in a polarized political cycle defined by outsider parties, permanent media campaigning, and an electorate worn down by institutional scandal — a moment in which a manufactured strongman with a catchy slogan no longer feels like obvious fantasy. Nox is funhouse populism, exaggerated past the point of plausibility and yet recognizable in its grammar. The satire’s target is not the candidate on the poster. It is the hunger that makes such a candidate thinkable.

The key art tells you the franchise knows exactly what it is selling. The crowd, the sash, the moustache, the aviators, and that incongruous tribute to El Fary — a cabaret singer who died in 2007 and stood for a working-class, pre-internet Spain — are not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. They are the franchise’s memory of itself, a set of signs that have meant the same thing across six films and almost three decades. Returning after a twelve-year absence, Torrente functions as a fixed coordinate against which a transformed country can be measured. The film is funniest, and most uncomfortable, precisely where the old signs still fit the new politics too well.

The crudeness is not incidental, and pretending otherwise misreads the film. Torrente is deliberately vulgar, frequently tasteless, built to offend on purpose, and that vulgarity is the instrument: it says aloud what polite political coverage will not. This is not the kind of film that asks to be admired the way a prestige drama is admired. It asks to be recognized. The argument it makes is not that it is refined but that it is legible — that close to four million people bought a cinema ticket and saw something true enough in the reflection to laugh at it.

Whether that laughter is release or anesthetic is the question the film leaves open, and leaves open on purpose. The franchise’s fixed point has always been that Torrente never wins, never reforms, never learns a thing — and that the country shows up for him regardless. An electoral Torrente only tightens the screw. He returns unchanged into a Spain that has changed around him, and that gap is where the movie does its quiet work behind the loud jokes. If a nation can laugh this hard at its own worst instincts wearing a presidential sash, the open question is what, precisely, the laughter is holding at bay.

Torrente Presidente opened in Spanish cinemas on 13 March 2026, distributed by Sony Pictures, where it became the biggest domestic opening in roughly fifteen years and went on to draw close to four million admissions and around €30 million at the box office. It arrives on Netflix on 26 June 2026. Santiago Segura directs, writes and stars; the cast includes Fernando Esteso, Gabino Diego, Carlos Areces and Ramón Langa.