“It’s not TV,” HBO used to claim of itself. Watching the first 12 minutes of Enrique Urbizu’s crime thriller “When Nobody Sees Us,” Max’s first Spanish original sneak-peaked at San Sebastián Festival Monday morning, the legendary HBO slogan came to mind.
Rather than TV, the scenes are pure cinema of the highest order.
In them, a man in a white ceremonial robe, kneels, draws a sword, carefully places it to his abdomen, and commits hari-kari.
Then a float of the local virgin edges down a street of whitewashed houses on the first day of Holy Week, in the village of Morón de la Frontera, Andalusia, southern Spain. When it stops, a young man emerges from the packed rows of penitents carrying it and, now out in the street, hallucinates that fellow black-hooded penitents and then the float itself levitate high in the sky. He collapses, his eyes bleeding.
Magaly Castillo, a U.S. army military police lieutenant, emerges from a plane that has just touched down at the U.S. Army Air Force base. Lucía Gutiérrez, a Spanish Civil Guard colonel, leaves her aged mother and daughter at home. Magaly is also seen putting on her uniform. Lucia arrives late at the procession before being called away to inspect the body of the suicide.
“What a f***** up way to kill yourself,” says her assistant.
“Isn’t there any way that isn’t?” Gutiérrez replies tartly.
“When Nobody Sees Us” is produced for Warner Bros. Discovery by Spain’s Zeta Studios, behind “Elite.”
The scenes are shot with the hallmark care of Urbizu, director of contempo film noir “No Rest for the Wicked” which won a 2012 Spanish Academy Goya for best picture. Urbizu also helmed the movie/series “Libertad,” part Western, part daily survival thriller.
“When Nobody Sees Us” looks like a full-on procedural thriller.
When Nobody Sees Us
Castillo is dispatched to the base to find out the whereabouts of a missing American soldier, said a synopsis released in June 2023 when the eight-episode series was announced.
The suicide appears linked to the shady business of Colonel Douglas Hoopen, head of the Air Force Base, and an underhand marine, Lieutenant Andrew Taylor. The two women soon discover that the two investigations are connected, and the case is more intricate than they had initially assumed, connecting Morón’s townspeople and the U.S. Base military personnel, the synopsis added.
“When Nobody Sees Us” stars Maribel Verdú (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Flash”) as Gutiérrez, Mariela Garriga (“Mission Imposible: Dead Reckoning II”) as Castillo and U.S. actors Austin Amelio (“The Walking Dead”) and Ben Temple (“30 Coins”) and Spain’s Dani Rovira (“Spanish Affair”).
Shots shown at San Sebastián are carefully composed, full of background detail in the procession crowd scenes, suggesting a high-end budget. They can surprise, such as a shot inside the box and penitents carrying the statue of the Virgin, moving over their heads. There’s little hand-held on-the-fly camerawork. Exteriors are lit by the luminous light of Andalusia, set against a pellucid blue sky.
“It’s a luminous series, lit by the light of Spain’s south. We were lucky to shoot in Spring when the countryside was still green. The crimes depicted in the series can be very dark, but the series, shot in exteriors by day, is transparent, clean,” said Urbizu.
“The thriller element builds and the series darkens but audiences will first find their way into the series via the main characters,” he predicts.
Warmly applauded at San Sebastián, the 12-minute excerpt catches Castillo and then Gutiérrez dressing in uniform. At the town’s processions, many people are in uniform too, Urbizu pointed out.
Morón de la Frontera is a little known part of Andalusia. One idea behind the series was to unveil it to audiences, he said. Its processions, shot at the rate of one day of Holy Week per episode, are “lived with a large respect for tradition.”
The U.S. base, shared with Spain, is a very particular world. “It’s hard to tell which buildings belong to which country. Again, like the processions, it’s a highly regulated world.”
The two worlds will clash as Castillo and Gutiérrez strike up a strong relationship investigating together in a case of cross border sorority, and of crime.
The series is now in post-production. “Enrique Urbizu has constructed his own universe which only a master of thrillers like him can create, in which two very different, even opposing, worlds live side by side, with everything running like clockwork,” said Alberto Carullo, VP Max, local original production, Iberia and Italy.”
“Maribel Verdú and Mariela Garriga plays two agents – one Spanish, one American – who come from very different contexts but strike up a chemistry sensed from the first moment. This will be our first Spanish series at Max and we can’t be prouder,” he added.