J Paul Johnson
For a good chunk of the Spanish thriller Something Is About to Happen (Que nadie duerma algo va a suceder), little does, giving the viewer pause to ponder: will something, indeed, happen? The answer is yes, and what does handsomely rewards the patience tested by its languid first act. What begins as something of a rather pedestrian woman’s midlife crisis drama turns into something more complex and, ultimately, more rewarding. Not that there’s anything wrong with an unadorned drama of a woman’s ageing, but director Antonio Méndez Esparza, working from a novel by Juan José Millás, has several spicy surprises in store for Something Is About to Happen‘s unpredictable third act. Something, it turns out, was indeed about to happen all along!
The plot centers on a woman named Lucia (played by a game Malena Alterio) who lives a humdrum life in Madrid, toiling away in an unrewarding IT job when she is let go. Newly unemployed and with more time than usual on her hands, she finds her dormant sexual desires sparked by a sexy neighbor (Rodrigo Poisón), an actor who introduces himself as “Calaf” (the prince in Puccini’s Turandot). The actor disappears, but the spark his presence lit in Lucia turns to a flame. Soon, emboldened by her new job as a taxi driver and armed with a quiverful of anecdotes, Lucia is finding herself stimulated in all kinds of new ways by her diverse and attentive clientele.
The film’s presentation is, to a point, slightly pedestrian, as Lucia’s process of self-reinvention is so incremental, it practically escapes notice. Some of the scenes seem, indeed, so mundane as to lack purpose: Lucia gets a tattoo, Lucia takes voice lessons, Lucia divulges her mother’s suicide. One wonders why these particular moments are worthy of the time given them; they seem simple, sundry, lacking purpose. “Something is about to happen,” Lucia often says, yet little does. But the script—adapted by Esparza and Clara Roquet—is nothing less than perfectly precise, slyly dispensing only what viewers need to know and nothing more, all the while laying the groundwork for the film’s inspirational and unexpected third act.
As Lucia’s clientele grows, she becomes especially close with a theater producer, Roberta (Aitana Sánchez–Gijón), with whom she begins what seems like a trusting friendship, and a chummy novelist, Santiago (José Luis Torrijo), with whom she begins an affair. All the while, Lucia still pines for her gone-missing Puccini-prince Calaf. Without divulging any spoilers, let’s just say that Esparza and Roquet cleverly connect all the dots in a way no one could predict, launching Something Is About to Happen into near-Taxi Driver (by way of Basic Instinct) territory.
If that sounds gimmicky, it’s not. The film’s patient approach to plotting and neorealist, almost verité-style cinematography and direction continue through its more metatextual and violent conclusion. Rather than focus on jump scares, cheap shocks, or stylistic tricks, Méndez Esparza and his team keep Lucia’s increasingly aberrant behaviors grounded in the real and everyday. Every member of the cast is good, but as Lucia, Malena Alterio—who won the Goya award for Best Actress for her performance—is onscreen at practically every moment. The film hews closely to her restricted point of view, never divulging anything she wouldn’t see or experience, and Alterio delivers a strong performance in the lead as a woman whose liberating reincarnation turns obsessive, dangerous, and unpredictably strange.
At a little over two hours, Something Is About to Happen doesn’t tick along with the clockwork precision of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller. It’s a little more Chantal Akerman by way of Hitchcock, gone to an even darker, weirder place. It’s a film that requires—but rewards—patience, providing plenty of pause to contemplate just where any of our more radical midlife reinventions might take us.
Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Something Is About to Happen premieres on VOD, digital, and Film Movement Plus on February 14, 2025.
