19/03/2025 - Gemma Blasco presents a devastating and powerful film about the experience of rape, starring the remarkable Ángela Cervantes

Alex, a young actress, is raped at a New Year's Eve party. When she turns to her brother Adrián for refuge and understanding, he reacts by questioning and pressuring her. Consumed by rage, he makes his own decisions, following an increasingly dark path. His reaction drives them apart, and she finds in the theatre the only way to channel her pain and anger by playing the vengeful character of Medea in Euripides' tragedy. This is the story told in Fury [+see also:
trailer
interview: Gemma Blasco
film profile], the first feature film by Gemma Blasco (director of the short film Jauría and the experimental film El zoo [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), written with Eva Pauné. After its world premiere at SXSW in Austin, it is now being presented at the 28th Málaga Film Festival.

Starring the remarkable Ángela Cervantes alongside Álex Monner, the film explores the fear, shame, disgust, and feelings of guilt by victims of sexual assault. It delves into the doubts about whether to speak out or remain silent, the difficulty of reporting the assault, and the nightmare that life becomes after such an ordeal. The film also highlights the everyday nature of these aggressions, and how, more often than not, the perpetrator is someone close to you, someone you know, someone you trusted, or even loved. It examines how, from the outside, even without intention or awareness, we continue to view sexual violence through a sexist lens, searching for nuances to minimise its significance. “Did he just touch you or did he rape you?” Adrián asks his sister, then reproaches her for being really high on drugs that night. With this, the film also addresses the human condition, the struggle between instinct and reason, the gap between how we might act if we allowed ourselves be driven by pain and anger, and how we act when we decide to behave as rational beings.

Blasco tackles all of this with brutal realism, while also incorporating symbolism, lucidly using metaphor through elements such as blood, the killing of animals and, above all, the play Medea. Although the mythological background is evident in the film, it remains no less evocative or powerful for that. In the character of Medea, who murders her own children in revenge against her husband, the protagonist expresses her torment, delivering scenes of great dramatic force, such as the one where she powerfully interprets a superb Cervantes in his central monologue. “There are those who, not knowing their neighbour's ins and outs, look at them with hatred without any offence having been given. But for me, for me, when this unexpected event happened to me, it destroyed my spirit. I'm lost, OK? I want to die, friends, friends, I want to die. Of all creatures that have a mind and a soul, there is no species more wretched than that of women (...).” The director also intelligently resolves that constant tension between the brutality of the explicit and the disturbing nature of the implicit with that sequence of the rape with the image completely in black, reminding us of the terror of what we cannot see, of what leaves no trace or evidence, and, in doing so, moving away from the morbid and the sensational.

“Why do we keep making the same tragedies over and over again?” the protagonist asks herself in a moving scene with Ana Torrent. Fury is a film of unusual strength, a film as devastating as it is powerful and brave. It is about the experience of sexual assault, how something inside is broken forever, how life is seen from that point on, and how to move forward; about fiction as a way out of everything we carry in life.

Fury is a production by Ringo Media and RM Película AIE, with international sales managed by Filmax, and will be released in Spain on 28 March.

(Translated from Spanish)