Fausto 5.0

This modern-day Spanish re-working of Goethe's Faust is the final part of a Faustian trilogy which also includes a play and an opera. Miguel Ángel Solá is Fausto, a brilliant but mentally unstable doctor whose speciality is saving terminal cases. He's a cold and vain man whose emotional life seems to have frozen. Santos Vella (Fernández), the ex-patient he meets (seemingly by chance) while at a medical conference in a faraway town, is gregarious, even aggressively friendly. At its best, this is eerie and ingenious, with an undertow of macabre humour. Shot in desaturated colours, it makes conventional cityscapes appear threatening. As Fausto's sanity begins to crack, he sees evil everywhere. Even the little old lady sitting next him on a train is not to be trusted. The three directors who collaborated on the film delight in such an arrogant and self-obsessed man's fall from grace. The one grating note is struck by Santos Vella himself. Bearded, grinning, gaudily dressed, he looks more like an egregious 1970s DJ than the incarnation of evil.