To view a quartet of films connected by a single actor, Eusebio Poncela (1945-2025), is to discover a fascinating cross-section of Spanish and Argentine cinema's evolution. Yet, to truly appreciate their brilliance, one must look beyond the thespian’s presence and delve into the unique, often audacious realms created by their respective directors. Poncela, a chameleon in each role (whether he is the lead or a supporting player), becomes a guide through four distinct landscapes of obsession, desire, and the human condition. Forget jump scares and cheap thrills. Zulueta's RAPTURE (his second and final feature film) is indeed an original kind of psychotronic horror - a film undergoes a process of autophagy, consuming the very lives it captures. Born from the vibrant, chaotic aftermath of Franco’s dictatorship, this film feels like a surreal incubus unfolding in a nondescript apartment. It’s a hazy, heroin-laced descent into obsession where a B-movie director José Sirgado (Poncela) receives a mysterious Super-8 film from Pedro (More), an acquaintance from the past who believes his camcorder is a sentient, autonomous, devouring entity. RAPTURE’s fabric is infused with the anxious, experimental restiveness of La Movida Madrileña (The Madrilenian Scene). Zulueta, a vanguard artist and designer, and a hophead himself, pulls out all stops to construct a visceral experience of addiction and a mystification of its hallucinations. The use of grainy, home-video footage becomes a narrative device. It's a key part of the film's visual grammar, connecting the characters’ mental deterioration with the physical medium, as if the very act of filming makes their self-destructive desires tangible. The disorienting, droning score and the eerily lighted, claustrophobic setting of José’s apartment further build a sense of inescapable dread. At the center of this maelstrom are three riveting performances that turn a surrealist concept into a compelling tragedy. As José, a man already drained of life, whose creative spirit and physical body hollowed out by drug addiction and artistic stagnation, Poncela's performance is one of passive surrender, a study in controlled decay, his listlessness is the counterpoint to the inconceivable mystery, rendering him the ideal victim to rise to the bait. This surrender stands in stark contrast to More's mesmerizing turn as Pedro, the drug-addled drone who is the discoverer and the patient zero of the eerie “addiction” that start to consume his entire reality. More is unsettlingly childlike, capricious and delivers a fanatical energy mostly through audio tapes and fragmented images, yet strangely entrancing. Caught between these two obsessive men is Roth's Ana, José's long-suffering partner. She is a woman entrapped in the emotional collateral of José’s artistic and narcotic addictions. Roth is magnificent in registering Ana’s powerlessness and codependency, but also typically left on the sideline in default of a clear agency of her own in the script. The film's most innovative element is its exploration of cinematic vampirism. The camcorder, for Pedro, feeds on the life and experiences it records. It's an intellectually disturbing horror that taps into a primal fear: that art can become an addictive drug, it revitalizes us but has an impending finality that cannot be diverted, regardless of the fact that whether such a phenomenon is hallucinogenic or not. RAPTURE is both Zulueta's radical apologia for drug addiction and a prescient warning of our technology-centered, apathy-afflicted society’s bane. Stepping from RAPTURE’s primordial terror and entering into the lurid, operatic universe of Almodóvar’s MATADOR (his fifth feature), is to witness a fascinating stylistic divergence between two contemporaries and friends (Almodóvar provides his own voice for a female character in RAPTURE and Zulueta was a vocal advocate and designed many posters for Almodóvar’s juvenilia). It goes without saying that MATADOR is a flamboyant celebration of theatrical excess, a hyper-stylized thriller that equates the passion of bullfighting with the lethal ecstasy of sexual climax, where necrophilia, death wish and rape fantasy are thrown in for good measure. Almodóvar’s signature is everywhere: vibrant colors, heightened melodrama, and an unflinching focus on the dark, complex nature of desire. Martínez and Serna (both palpably ground their performances in the aberrant natures of their fixations) passionately embody the central, murderous lovers Diego, an ex-bullfighter, and Maria, a lawyer, whose paths are crossed through Ángel (Banderas, a wonderful catalyst, only him can pull off the extremely inappropriate wisecrack about rape), a squeamish weakling subjugated under his mother’s high-handed churchiness, whose rape attempt of Eva (Cobo, a weak link among the cast, who squanders away a complex role with her blank inexpressiveness, where was Victoria Abril when she was sorely needed?), Diego’s girlfriend, kicks off the fateful encounter of two souls possessed by their deadly perverse desires. In MATADOR, Poncela takes on a supporting turns as the weary Police Commissioner, a role that mostly serves as the audience's emotional proxy. He is a pragmatic, grounded presence in a world spiraling into theatrical madness and whose queerness is only hinted at (he and Banderas would reunite in Almodóvar’s next feature LAW OF DESIRE as the two leads where their carnal passion would go full bloom). His detached perspective allows the audience to witness the feverish tango of death and desire from a safe distance, making the film's brutal choreography feel even more pronounced. Also, Serrano's rigid, haughty interpretation of Ángel's mother, Berta, is a standout for its terrifying blend of puritanical piety and sinister control, a walking and talking emblem of the very institutions and values Almodóvar gleefully seeks to subvert. The central theme is the lethal convergence of love and death. Almodóvar views passion as a kind of ritualistic sacrifice, one that finds its purest form in the precise, beautiful violence of the bullring. MATADOR presents itself as a transgressive take on Spanish machismo, turning the bullfighter into a psychosexual predator whose art is not about dominance but about a shared, deadly surrender. The final scene, a crescendo of blood and passion during an eclipse, is pure Almodóvar, a moment where the stylized violence becomes an act of sexual orgasm, as horrifying as it is breathtakingly arresting. While not his best offering (the denouement is quite a downer as Diego and Maria’s ritual becomes a solitary act that eliminates any tension which has been properly primed thus far), the film runs away with a spectacular effusion of an alternative view on how extreme one can take their Freudian risk to. A decade elapses, Aristarain's MARTÍN (HACHE), an Argentina and Spain coproduction, is a familiarly melancholic, fairly eloquent critique on macho toxicity (and how that affects those around). It is a work that values conversation over action, with a narrative driven not by plot but by the slow, painful unfolding of a strained, fractured father-son relationship between Martin (Luppi), a divorced filmmaker in Madrid and his 19-year-old son Martin Jr. aka. Hache (Botto), who comes to live with him from Argentina after surviving a drug overdose, and its true power can be found in the plain honesty of its characters and the sheer philosophical punch packed into every conversation. Poncela embodies Dante, the charismatic, pansexual actor and Martin’s best friend, so thoroughly committed that it's difficult to imagine anyone else in the role. Assuming the role of a crucial and politic mediator between the bitter, detached Martín and the emotionally stunted and rudderless Hache, and between Martin and her cocaine-hooked, discontented girlfriend Alicia (Roth), Dante becomes the lifeblood of the film, a free-spirited whirlwind and a man who lives by his own rules. Poncela captures the bohemian intellectual with a disarming ease, brilliantly delivering sagacious, impassioned speeches that are both philosophical and touchingly personal. He is a walking contradiction - a hedonist with a moral compass, providing the intellectual and rational fire that the other characters, stuck in their own grooves, cannot. Roth's Alicia can be viewed as an extension of her Ana in RAPTURE, only this time, is given a juicier part to play. A woman mired in her own existential dissatisfaction largely due to an ossified society’s patriarchal pressure (she cannot free herself from Martin, who stints on affections and obdurately self-centered), Alicia is an editor, a role that mirrors her personal state - she is trying to make sense of a chaotic reality, but her own life remains fragmented and unedited. Roth truly pours out an aching vulnerability and a caustic wit, often lashing out with sharp-tongued observations while battling her own inner demons and jones. Her scenes with both Martín and Dante are fraught with a noticeable mercuriality that reveals a deep-seated loneliness. Alicia is a woman precariously clinging on the edge, whose grievous upshot only exposes Aristarain's own masculine infelicity to shoehorn a woman’s rebellion to the acute corner of miserabilism. It’s also worth pausing to consider the nuances in treating drug use. While RAPTURE positions heroin as an uncanny, devouring, yet inexplicably invigorating force that drains its characters to the point of extinction, MARTÍN (HACHE) presents narcotics as a recreational, almost mundane, part of its characters’ social landscape. A form of self-medication for their chronic, existential dissatisfaction, even Hache’s overdose is casually depicted as a mere accident. This shift in perspective fascinatingly reveals a great deal about the changing ethos in Iberian and Ibero-American cinemas. The meat of MARTÍN (HACHE) is its inquiry of generational and existential malaise: a generation that fought for freedom only to be disillusioned by it, and a new generation that, born into that freedom, is listless and without purpose. Only, Dante the nonconformist becomes the embodiment of a life lived without compromise, a contrast to both the father's cynicism and the son's apathy. The film is a tender and heartbreaking testament to the quiet grace of finding meaning in the void, a poignant reminder that even the most fractured souls can forge fleeting moments of genuine connection, even the sappy ending fits like a glove. Yet, what about Alicia? It is hard to stomach that Martin can come through scot-free, both morally and psychologically. 4 years later, Poncela earned his sole Goya Award nomination in Fresnadillo's INTACT, a slick, cerebral thriller that dares to build a complete, self-contained mythology around the abstract concept of luck. Fresnadillo, in his full-length feature debut, vigorously imagineers a secret society gambles on this intangible yet transferable commodity (via sympathetic magic), whether it is crossing a busy highway in blindfold, or choosing a subject and stealing their “luck” (this part needs some extra elucidation though), or simply a live-or-die Russian roulette test. Poncela plays Federico, the disgraced "luck thief" with a trenchant mix of desperation and cold calculation. He is a man stripped of his power, a has-been in a world where fortune is everything. Federico’s quest for revenge against his mentor Sam (von Sydow) - though it is not entire lucid how they fall out, is it merely because Federico wants to call it quits? - drive the narrative forward. He seeks out Tomás (Sbaraglia), a bank robber and a plane crash’s sole survivor who has unwittingly amassed a huge reservoir of stolen luck, and grooms him to be “the luckiest one in the world”. As Tomás, Sbaraglia is an upstanding protagonist who unknowingly stumbles into this high-stakes world. He navigates a fascinating arc, beginning as a disoriented and traumatized survivor and gradually transforming into a cunning opportunist who must learn to weaponize his own fortune. Sbaraglia's silent intensity conveys the moral compromises Tomás makes, revealing a character who, despite his newfound power, remains a pawn in a larger game. López also conducts a commanding presence as Sara, the persistent, methodical police investigator who is a sole island of pragmatism in a sea of the surreal, trying to apply logic to a world governed by an unseen force, but also impelled and scarred by her own harrowing trauma. Her presence adds a critical layer of tension and moral weight, as she resolves to unravel the cult of luck by hook or by crook. Moreover, there is Sam, the omnipotent, serene patriarch. With his iconic gravitas, von Sydow brings an almost biblical impenetrability to a figure of absolute authority whose indomitable luck could be only compromised by contingency. Beyond its high-concept premise and clever, often bizarre, set pieces - from a blindfolded race through a forest to a surreal game involving insects and a molasses-covered scalp, each game is a brilliant metaphor for the randomness of fate - INTACT probes into a blue-sky question: Can luck be controlled? Is it a force of nature, or a skill to be honed? While the answer is pretty obvious, the film argues that luck is a kind of energy, and its use or misuse defines the nature of our lives. Both Tomás and Sam’s fates can be construed as a cautionary tale about the illusion of control, suggesting that in the end, fate is not a force to be stolen, but a consequence to be accepted. In a word, Fresnadillo’s arch design is diverting but his execution and narratology fall short of mastery. Ultimately, trough the steady, transformative presence of Poncela, this selected quartet forges a magnetic and unflinching tapestry of the human condition in all its flawed glory or debased victory - its obsessions, its madness, its search for meaning, and its ultimate surrender to forces both internal and external. Each builds a world so singular and audacious it demands full attention and merits applauds (to varied degrees) afterwards. referential entries: Alejandro Amenábar’s THESIS (1996, 7.3/10); Carlos Carrera’s THE CRIME OF PADRE AMARO (2002, 6.4/10); Carlos Sorin’s INTIMATE STORIES (2002, 7.2/10); Pedro Almodóvar’s KIKA (1993, 7.6/10), LAW OF DESIRE (1987, 7.1/10).

English Title: RaptureOriginal Title: ArrebatoYear: 1979Genre: Drama, Mystery, FantasyCountry: SpainLanguage: Spanish Director/Screenwriter: Iván ZuluetaComposer: NegativoCinematographer: Ángel Luis FernándezEditor: José Luis PeláezCast:Eusebio PoncelaWill MoreCecilia RothMarta Fernández MuroHelena Fernán-GómezCarmen GiraltLuis CigesRating: 7.1/10Title: MatadorYear: 1986Genre: Drama, Thriller, CrimeCountry: SpainLanguage: SpanishDirector: Pedro AlmodóvarScreenwriters: Pedro Almodóvar, Jesús FerreroComposer: Bernardo BonezziCinematographer: Ángel Luis FernándezEditor: José SalcedoCast:Assumpta SernaNacho MartínezAntonio BanderasEva CoboJulieta SerranoChus LampreaveEusebio PoncelaCarmen MauraLuis CigesBibiana FernándezVerónica ForquéPedro AlmodóvarJaime Chávarri Jesús RuymanRating: 6.9/10Title: Martin (Hache)Year: 1997Genre: DramaCountry: Spain, ArgentinaLanguage: SpanishDirector: Adolfo AristarainScreenwriters: Adolfo Aristarian, Kathy SaavedraComposer: Fito PáezCinematographer: Porfirio EnríquezEditor: Fernando PardoCast:Federico LuppiJuan Diego BottoEusebio PoncelaCecilia RothAna María PicchioSancho GraciaEnrique LiporaceRating: 7.2/10English Title: IntactOriginal Title: Intacto Year: 2001Genre: Thriller, Fantasy, DramaCountry: SpainLanguage: Spanish, EnglishDirector: Juan Carlos FresnadilloScreenwriters: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Andrés M. KoppelComposer: Lucio GodoyCinematographer: Xavi GiménezEditor: Nacho Ruiz CapillasCast:Leonardo SbaragliaEusebio PoncelaMónica LópezMax von SydowAntonio DechentGuillermo ToledoPaz GómezPedro BeitiaMarta GilJesús NogueroRating: 6.9/10