Under Her Control opens on something that sounds like kindness. A young woman at a fashion house believes a pregnancy will end a career that has barely begun, and her boss, instead of letting her go, offers to adopt the child. On paper it is a rescue. But when the person who controls your job, your money and your future offers help, you have to ask what she is buying, and the film keeps asking it for most of its running time.

Fran Torres, in his first feature, builds a slow drama with a thriller running underneath. The Spanish title, La jefa, means The Boss, and it states the subject more bluntly than the English one. One woman can ask for anything. The other can hardly refuse. Sofía is an Argentinian immigrant in Madrid, with a boyfriend, Nacho, who wants a family she is unsure about. She has just landed an internship with the designer she idolizes. That designer, Beatriz, could never bear a child herself. Her offer comes with a large payment and a condition: Sofía must live with her in a secluded country house, where nobody will see that she is pregnant. Nobody hides a pregnancy this carefully for the sake of a simple adoption, and the film lets that thought settle in before any character says it aloud. Some viewers have called the film a Spanish Devil Wears Prada with a thriller grafted on. The fashion world and the ambitious newcomer do invite that comparison, but Torres is colder and far less interested in glamour.

Aitana Sánchez-Gijón plays Beatriz with the ease of someone used to being agreed with. A gracious sentence from her lands as an instruction, and nobody needs to raise a voice. Her charm is never decoration; it is how Beatriz gets things done, and the actress handles it with restraint instead of waving it about. You believe that a young employee would struggle to say no to her. The story needs that belief before anything else in it can function, and Sánchez-Gijón supplies it from her first scene.

Cumelén Sanz has the harder job. Sofía has to want the career, fear losing it, hide a pregnancy from her partner and weigh an offer she can barely afford to refuse, and much of that must be played through reaction rather than speech. Sanz holds her ground opposite a far more established presence. Their scenes together are the reason to watch. Beatriz talks about care, and Sofía hears a routine. The polite surface of what they say counts for less than what each of them wants from the other, and both actresses know it.

The supporting players are solid, though rarely given room. Pedro Casablanc is Julio, the lawyer, and Vanesa Rasero is Cristina, Beatriz’s private doctor. They give the arrangement a chilly professionalism. A contract and a medical regimen make a dubious bargain look orderly, and that unsettles more than open villainy would. Álex Pastrana, as Nacho, has the thankless task of embodying the life Sofía is asked to step away from. Salomé Jiménez (Carmen), María Fernández Prat (Belén) and Younes Bachir (Hamid) have smaller parts, and none of them leaves much of a mark.

My trouble is the pacing. The film slackens just where it should tighten, and a story built on pressure cannot afford that. The plot keeps adding turns of the screw: the hidden cameras Sofía discovers in the house, Beatriz’s compromise of switching off the indoor ones while keeping the outdoor ones running for her protection, the phone that goes missing, the exercise schedule that wears Sofía down, the dog meant to soothe her, the housekeeper who is suddenly gone. Each one should tighten the trap. Yet the film lingers on the comfort of the house for so long that the quieter stretches feel like waiting rather than dread. Even the loss of the phone, which ought to be a jolt, passes without much shock. What is missing is the sense, scene after scene, that the walls are closing in. I came out of the long middle section admiring the setup and wishing the film would stop admiring it too. A viewer who wants a tense thriller may drift. A viewer who came for a study of power will be more forgiving.

There is also the matter of how much Torres tries to carry. Ambition and betrayal sit beside immigration, exploitation and surrogacy, and the thriller plot has to hold all of it up inside 109 minutes. Not every theme gets equal weight, and the ones that arrive late or at the edges feel noted rather than explored. Sofía is a foreigner, alone, dependent on her employer’s house and goodwill, and that deserved far more than the occasional line or look. Even the false references she used to get her foot in the door could have fed a sharper argument about who gets to be believed and who gets to be pitied. I would rather Torres had chosen fewer subjects and pushed them harder.

Still, the central idea holds. A powerful woman offers to solve a younger woman’s crisis, and the solution happens to give the powerful one exactly what she wants. For a good while the film leaves that ambiguity alone and lets Beatriz stay human rather than monstrous. When the offer is first made, it sounds entirely reasonable, and the early scenes work because of that. It is also why the sagging middle stings: the premise is sharper than the stretch of film built to deliver it. Sánchez-Gijón and Sanz are good enough to carry a film that squeezes harder and wanders less, and this one only occasionally lets them. I hope Torres trusts his own tension a little more next time.