The Fury of a Patient Man

(Tarde para la ira)

Raúl Arévalo / Spain / 2016 / 92 min
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  • Goya® Awards

    Best Film, Best New Director, Best Original Screenplay

  • Cinema Writers Circle Awards

    Best Film, Best New Director, Best Original Screenplay

  • José María Forqué Awards

    Best Picture

  • Venice Film Festival

    Best Actress

  • Toronto International Film Festival

  • BFI London Film Festival

  • SUBTITLE European Film Festival, Kilkenny, Ireland

  • Spanish Film Festival, Sydney

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Spanish with English subtitles

With Antonio de la Torre, Luis Callejo, Ruth Díaz, Manolo Solo, Alicia Rubio, Font García

Winning Best Picture, Best New Director and Best Original Screenplay at the 2017 Goya Awards, The Fury of a Patient Man is Raúl Arévalo’s breathtaking directorial debut, a thriller about a man who has waited years to avenge a crime everyone else has forgotten.

Right from the beginning the film grips the audience, as we’re thrust into the aftermath of a jewelry store robbery that has left the owner comatose, a female sales clerk dead and the getaway driver in hot pursuit by police. Eight years later, the imprisoned driver, Curro (Luis Callejo) has become a rage-filled man. His girlfriend Ana (Ruth Díaz) lives alone with their son and spends her days bartending in Madrid, where an unassuming regular José (Antonio de la Torre, Cannibal, Volver), keeps her company. Alone at night, however, José obsessively watches CCTV footage of the robbery. The simmering rage of both men finally boils over when Curro returns, expecting to restart his life but instead finding everything has changed.

With distinct echoes of the western genre, Arévalo’s precise and unrelenting revenge thriller is deservedly being marked as one of Spain’s best.

Press

“The road to hell is paved with bad intentions in Spanish actor Raul Arévalo's auspicious, uncompromising genre-inflected debut.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“The film begins well, as a thriller, and ends better, with the cadence of a Western.” – Pilar Ayuso, El Nuevo Herald (Miami)

“This film deserves to be salute with all honors for being one of the most brutal and outstanding debuts of national cinema.” – José Martín, El antepenúltimo mohicano

“An debut film that leaves the press glued to their seats. The Fury of a Patient Man is pure Peckinpah, is pure Saura. And, above all, is pure cinema.” – Andrea G. Bermejo, Cinemania

“An incisive portrait of corrugated masculinity and the extremely different ways it can manifest in a society still underscored with elements of machismo. Curro is violent, felonious, loud, and blue-collar where Jose is polite, cultured, and quiet. “The Fury of a Patient Man” reminds us all, in darkly dazzling form, that it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Every so often, Spanish cinema throws up a grungy, beautifully compact thriller that is indeed authentically Spanish, rather than an imitation of U.S. models...Patient Man is a candidate for Spain's best thriller of the year, its mounting tension sometimes so visceral as to ensure that it will not quickly be forgotten. ” – Jonathan Holland, The Hollywood Reporter

About the Director
Raul Arévalo is a Spanish film actor and director. His first standout role was Dark Blue Almost Black (2006), Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s first film. He later worked on Antonio Banderas’s Summer Rain (2006) and Gracia Querejeta’s Seven Billiard Tables (2007), for which he was nominated for a Goya for Best Supporting Actor. In 2008, he starred in José Luis Cuerda’s The Blind Sunflowers, which garnered him a Goya nomination for Best Male Lead. Under the direction of Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, he won a 2009 Goya for Best Supporting Actor for the comedy Fat People. Other titles in his filmography include The Last Circus (2010) by Álex de la Iglesia, Even The Rain (2010), by Icíar Bollaín, and Ghost Graduation by Javi Ruiz Caldera (2012). In 2014, Arévalo co-starred in Alberto Rodríguez’s Marshland alongside Javier Gutierrez, the same year he premiered the comedy Sidetracked, followed in 2016 by the thriller To Steal From A Thief (2016) by Daniel Calparsoro. The Fury Of A Patient Man is his directing debut.
Notes on Film

“The Fury of a Patient Man is a dramatic thriller coming straight from the gut. Hatred, bitterness, rage, pent-up anger are issues that have moved and interested me.

One of the challenges was to portray everything with the greatest realism possible. To talk about violence from my point of view: a dry, raw, rough violence, just as it is in life itself. And to do so by means of a plot line and structure full of intrigue, one that combines this search for realism and believability with the spectacular nature and pacing of a genre film, while keeping spectators fully engaged throughout.

I believe cinema must have an identity, which is why I decided to set the story in places I am intimately familiar with, where I grew up, lived and breathed as a child: neighborhoods on the outskirts, small towns in Castilla, bars with saw-dust covered floors and card games being played, roadside hotels… Very recognizable locations with an aesthetic, colors and atmospheres that reinforce the story and characters. A story that is very much our own, one with our own codes. Because I believe we should speak about what we know, about what moves us. We should dig deep down to our roots in order to tell a story that, in the end, if it talks about human beings, is universal.”

– Raúl Arévalo, Director

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