‘Collision Course’ (2026) Netflix Movie Review - A Twist-Heavy Thriller With Nothing Much to Say

Daniel Sánchez Arévalo's Collision Course (or Colisión) is conceived with only one thing in mind: twist after twist after twist. It's hard to talk about it without getting into spoilers, so read further at your own risk if you haven't watched the film.

Written by Arévalo and Ramón Campos, Collision Course opens by establishing the backdrop of Madrid's financial crisis in 2012–13, only to give the four robbers at its center a motivation for carrying out their heist. They are Raul (Álvaro Cervantes), Pedro (Karra Elejalde), Tomas (Tamar Novas), and Carla (Laia Costa), and they enter a bank looking for a box numbered 34, which contains diamonds that would be distributed equally among them to help ease their financial troubles in these difficult times. Wouldn't it have been better if the movie had given more space to scenes or lines that might have lent credibility to their financial struggles by highlighting what's eating away at them? We get a reason for Raul and Pedro's involvement in the heist, but it's nothing more than a disposable line. What about Tomas and Carla? Is rent an issue? Are they unable to afford groceries? What's the cost of living?

Arévalo curiously never bothers to bring these details to the surface, details that would have made the financial crisis a more personal tragedy. This would have infused the movie with an emotional dimension, enriching its characters and their motivations instead of reducing them to tools employed to deliver the story's various twists. By placing too much emphasis on these twists and too little (almost nothing) on the characters' private lives, Arévalo generates a rug-pulling machine whose only job is to blindside the audience for the entirety of its runtime. The filmmakers go about this by indulging in "what if" theories. They would kill off one character and follow the other three to see how far they would go and where they would end up eventually. For instance, in the first chapter, Raul dies, and we follow Carla, Tomas, and Pedro. In the second, Tomas dies in an alternative scenario, and we follow the other three. This means there are four chapters in the film, followed by an epilogue (of sorts) that ends on a happy note, though the more you think about it, the more half-baked and false it seems.

It appears as if the one and only brief the filmmakers received was to keep the so-called second-screen audience engaged throughout the film. Given the relentlessness of the cliffhangers and twists, that brief might as well have been a dare that Arévalo and Campos took up with confidence. In their zeal to shock us, they leave us with a nothingburger of a thriller that, in the end, has nothing to say about either its own political context or its characters' dreams. After four theoretical deaths, a fifth one occurs on this side of the screen. Call that chapter "Viewer's Interest" because we do end up checking out of the movie mentally.