“A brilliant, scary film that captures both the violence of terrorism in contemporary Spain and the horrifying violations of human rights in Latin America. Saura used a real public hearing on torture as the basis for this edge-of-the-seat drama in which a producer and his actress girlfriend try to turn their investigation into living theater - against the constant threats of right-wing vigilantes. They also try, in sequences of lyrical beauty, to establish a relationship and to discover their own identities. As in the films of Hitchcock, the explosions of violence are a catharsis for the constant mood of terror, the sense of living on the edge of a volcano.”