One of the most interesting Spanish filmmakers of the younger generation, Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Que dios nos perdone, El reino, Madre, As bestas), continues to deal with the issue of systemic corruption in Spanish society. After the exceptional thriller “El reino”, Sorogoyen and his constant screenwriting collaborator Isabel Pena filmed a fantastic six-part series that also deals with corruption, but this time in the justice system. “Antidisturbios” or “Riot Police” begins as a story about a squad of Madrid intervention policemen who are sent to evict the tenants of a building in the old part of the city. The court sent an order to the police, the superiors forwarded it and team leader Salvador Osorio (Hovik Keuchkerian) with his colleagues Diego (Raul Arevalo), Parra (Alex Garcia), Ubedo (Roberto Alamo), Ruben (Patrick Criado) and new colleague Elias ( Raul Prieto) sent on an assignment.
However, the apartment is barricaded, numerous activists have arrived inside to support the family being forced out of the apartment by the bank, and Osorio is aware that it will be difficult for one team to peacefully deal with more than thirty people who crowded into the apartment. He calls his superior and asks for reinforcements, since in such situations usually three police teams go, through the bailiff he calls the judge to postpone the eviction until the conditions are met, but he receives an order that the six of them must carry out the orders. At one point, several neighbors of Senegalese immigrants will join the activists, and one of them will fall from the terrace and die during the unrest.
The police will immediately launch an internal investigation into the incident, the entire intervention team will face court proceedings on charges that they caused the death of a man, and the public will also start discussing the role of the police. The police internal control will be involved in the investigation and the investigation will be led by a young, persistent, but somewhat naive inspector, the idealist Laia Urquijo (Vicky Luengo), who will also initially come to the conclusion that these six police officers are to blame for the accident. However, she will be somewhat suspicious that the investigation ends so quickly and that it is in everyone’s interest to sacrifice the team of intervention police officers, and she will continue to investigate and realize that the problem is much, much deeper and more serious.
She will continue to investigate this on her own and will also get into trouble when she begins to discover how the eviction system works and that there is a serious network of powerful people out there who use the situation to enrich individuals. They will understand that this mechanism goes practically to the very top and it seemed to me at one point that “Antidisturbios” could be a kind of Spanish answer to the legendary “Zica”. Although this exciting, incredibly dynamic and almost horrifyingly realistic mini-series consists of only six episodes, Sorogoyen and Pena brilliantly captured the depth of the problem and comprehensively showed how this perverted system works.
And just like any content that deals with this topic, it is again terrifyingly cynical, and in order to make everything seem realistic, we follow the situation with a hand-held camera in the moments when the action is taking place. So the viewer constantly has the feeling that the police are on the field, whether it’s evictions, securing matches or protests. Again, Sorogoyen did it brilliantly and managed to reach wide and deep, because nothing here is black and white, and each episode is titled after one of the police officers, so we follow the perspective to some extent from his or her perspective. The characters are fully developed and the viewer can identify with them, understand their problems, the gravity of the situation they are faced with, but also see how different they are.
Each of them will deal in their own way with the situation and the knowledge that an innocent man died because of them, and this awareness and the fact that they could not only lose their job, but also end up in prison, will affect their psyche. Although they act as a team and are close friends, they are all mainly family people with their own problems and many of them will think more and more about how to save their own skin. The character of the young internal control inspector Laia is also interesting, a girl who seems to understand her job as a kind of crusade and is convinced that she is doing good, not even realizing at first that she is being manipulated and used as part of a well-established mechanism. “Antidisturbios” proved to be a top series in which we see that behind every intervention policeman masked in armor and armed with a baton, there are people with dreams, problems, frustrations and principles hiding. People whom someone sends on often extremely dangerous tasks and forces them to beat up the citizens, and at the same time they will sacrifice them without any problems when it gets crowded.