After the excellent thriller “La isla minima” (Marshland) from 2014, Spanish filmmaker Alberto Rodriguez made another quality film, the action of which takes place in the transition period after the death of dictator Francisco Franco and the transition of Spain from totalitarianism to democracy. “Modelo 77” or “Prison 77” is inspired by real events from the transition period and takes place in a prison in Barcelona between 1976 and 1978. The young accountant Manuel (Miguel Herran, best known as Rio from the series “La casa de papel”) ended up there because of fraud charges, who claims that he is not guilty, but that the money from the company was stolen by the owner’s son, and he is armed with a gun.
However, Manuel was immediately thrown into the strictest prison where, according to the laws of the time, he can be held for up to four years before the trial even begins. And Spanish prisons are full. There are real criminals and sociopaths there, but also countless political prisoners, as well as innocent people summarily convicted under the regime of a dictator who threw everything he didn’t want on the street into prison. The conditions are gruesome, the guards live on the prisoners who have no rights, and with that shock, recklessness and cruelty, “Prison 77” reminds of the masterful “Hunger” by Steve McQueen. However, as the old dictator strengthened, democracy is finally coming to Spain, so the prisoners are also hoping for a general amnesty, since a good number of them ended up in prison for no reason.
Manuel will thus end up in a cell with the old criminal Jose Pino (standard excellent Javier Guttierez who played the inspector in “La isla minima”), an experienced guy who has been through everything and anything. And while Manuel will very soon join the movement of prisoners demanding amnesty or at least a review of certain cases (Manuel primarily hopes that his case will reach the court soon, but no way that will happen), Jose Pino is one of those guys who watches how will get the best benefit out of everything for himself. But that too will change when Jose Pino realizes that he simply can’t stay on the sidelines any longer and huge protests and riots in prisons across Spain will soon begin.
Thematically and in terms of the characters, “Prison 77” reminded me a bit of the legendary “Shawshank Redemption” because there we also have a young accountant who claims he is not guilty like Tim Robbins and an older guy who practically spent his whole life in prisons and is full of life wisdom like which was Morgan Freeman. However, the circumstances are significantly different here, and the conditions in Spanish prisons in the second half of the seventies seem even worse than those in the United States (at least according to Shawshank) in the forties and fifties. Somehow, when we think of Spain, probably no one thinks that until the end of the seventies it was a dictatorship, a totalitarian state that was not too different from similar communist dictatorships current at that time.
In this striking combination of thriller and prison drama, Rodriguez succeeds in bringing the viewer closer to the time it was about, and at the same time, it is a film that does not get lost in didacticism, but is a first-class genre achievement. Just as it was the case with “La isla minima”, the environment and circumstances here really influence everything that happens, but all this is in the service of the story itself, which is performed exceptionally. The film is equally exciting and shocking, tragic and incredible, with convincing acting performances that remind us of the horrors of that gruesome regime, and at the same time offer quality entertainment. At the end of “Prison 77”, he had as many as 16 nominations for the Goya Award, eventually winning five awards in the technical categories.