It is a reference to the ‘wolf pack’ case, which involved five men from Seville accused of gang-raping an 18-year-old woman during the bull-running festivities in Pamplona in 2016 the subsequent trial has polarised Spanish society, played a role in consolidating the far-right Vox’s vote and galvanised the feminist movement. When Salvador travels to the working-class district of Vallecas in southern Madrid to score heroin, graffiti on the wall spells out “Sister, I believe you”, fixing the film very much in the recent past. The vestiges of sociological Francoism also contaminate the present. Salvador proffers the illiterate Eduardo access to an education that has been denied him by society’s wider inequalities – illiteracy in Spain in 1960 was close to 15 per cent. The film has a fiercely political dimension. The church’s corrupt control over education and public life is evidenced in rules that can be bent at the clergy’s whim, in the reprimand Salvador is given by a priest for having ‘pagan’ recreational tastes (The Beatles, cinema), and in the power exerted by the village holy woman – a gloriously pious cameo from Susi Sánchez. Unhappy at being sent off to the seminary – the only chance of a decent education for the children of the rural or urban poor – he runs out of the cave in anger. Like the precocious Ana Torrent in Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos (1975), nine-year-old actor Asier Flores disarms with his incisive comments. With his observant gaze and sharp intelligence, the boy Salvador is one of a long list of child protagonists in Spanish cinema offering a window on to the problematic years of Franco’s dictatorship. Revisiting the Paterna cave dwelling of his childhood – a return to the womb in Freudian terms – he recalls encountering sexual desire for the first time and sharing the pleasures of literacy with Eduardo, the young mason helping the family to decorate the cave. As in I’m So Excited! (2013), which similarly featured an elixir with the power to transport the characters to altered states of being, Salvador is taken to a place that allows him to make sense of the condition he finds himself in.

Salvador’s journey back into his 1960s boyhood is facilitated by water – the first scene sees him immersed in a swimming pool – and by drugs, both prescribed and illegal. Distributor Pathé Productions Ltd / 20th Century Fox International (UK)

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