A standard premise that can be used for a variety of genres, from comedy to horror, When Angels Sleep starts off by showing us a tired and harried businessman (Germán, played by Julián Villagrán) trying to get home as quickly as possible. He has already been chastised by his wife (Marian Álvarez) for missing his daughter's birthday party, but at least making the lengthy drive home in good time might allow him to regain some goodwill. It isn't long until he's pulled over by the police, however, weaving back and forth on the road after dropping off to sleep. The police take him to a motel and force him to rest up, an order he pretends to obey. Once back on the road, it's not long until his night goes from bad to worse, hitting a young girl with his car and then trying to convince her friend that he didn't do it on purpose.
Written and directed by Gonzalo Bendala (only his second feature, from what I could see), When Angels Sleep is a competent and well-made dark thriller, but it doesn't quite manage to keep viewers onside as everything escalates. Viewers don't really get to spend enough time with Germán before everything starts going wrong, we just know that he's a busy man who often seems too busy to make time for his family, nor do we get to get to know any of the supporting players that well. It's hard to think of a way this could have been fixed within the suitable runtime, approximately 91 minutes, but something else was needed here.
Villagrán is perfectly fine in the main role, even if the full transformation of his character doesn't land as well as it should (something I don't view as his fault), and Ester Expósito is very good in the role of Silvia, the young woman understandably terrified of someone she thinks has deliberately used his car as a deadly weapon, but they aren't fleshed out enough to carry what is essentially a two-hander for most of the runtime. Yes, Álvarez is also a constant presence, and other characters move on and off the screen, but the main tension, the main battle of wills, is between Germán and Silvia, and neither character shows us enough to get us fully on their side as a bad accident and horrible misunderstanding turns into something much more dangerous. Yes, we're automatically against the idea of anyone dying, of course, but there's a lack of tension here due to viewers not really caring about whatever the ultimate outcome will be.
Bendala does well in showing the escalation of events, but that's the only thing that he gets absolutely right. There's nothing else here that feels fully worth your time. Everyone onscreen starts in quite a bad place and then suffers as they move forward, there's sadly nothing here that is pleasantly surprising or unpredictable once Bendala gets the ball rolling on the main chain of events, and the coda at the very end of the film is as underwhelming and unsatisfying as a number of other scenes. You could watch this if you have nothing else prioritised ahead of it, but I would advise you that there should always be better options to give your time to.
4/10
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