SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN Review: It Lives Up to Its Title

A character study, a dark comedy, a social satire, with a sly revenge thriller snuck in for good measure, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s portentously titled Something Is About To Happen has a lot going on in its two-hour runtime.

One might think too much, if it were not its gripping central performance from Malena Alterio who as Lucia, transforms from a meek and miserable IT support worker balancing her time with daily errands and care for her dementia stricken father, to a risk happy taxi driver with a serious case of carpe diem. The film, both formally and feverishly, blends the mundane struggle of making ends meet in the big city, with the extreme highs and lows of operatic events. 



Lucia is introduced, dwarfed by the hustle and noise of Madrid, awkwardly comforting a coworker with platitudes on a street corner. The formally ostentatious title cards, the slow-zoom, and densely layered soundtrack, tonally, are telling another story, however: something is about to happen.

Indeed, Lucia is soon out of a job as the entire company collapses in corporate scandal and fraud. On the cab ride home, she gets the idea of buying a taxi license, and learning the city as a way of reinventing herself after a career collapse at 40.



The same night, through the paper thin walls of her apartment, she hears Pavarotti belting out "Nessun dorma" from Puccini’s Turandot and it adds a calm kind of energy to the chaos of her life. Leaving her comfort zone, she knocks on the door of the source of the music and boldly flirts with the hunky thespian who resides therein. Fun fact: the equally ominous Spanish title, Que Nadie Duerma, the name Juan José Millás novel from which the film was adapted, translates to "Let No One Sleep," which is the satirical mission statement, the axis on which everything in this deceptively convoluted story spins. 



Picture a mid-life Carrie White, absent the psychokinesis and apocalyptic christianity, who wandered into a Michael Haneke film, and that starts to get at the savagery the film eventually evolves into. Lucia might be the hero of her own story, but she is no saint.

The magical lies she chooses to tell herself on her Eat, Pray, Love journey are mercilessly scrutinized, examined, and upended in ways that are delightfully uncomfortable even if you hone in on the particular wavelength of the filmmaking (notice also, that Lucia never loses her agency throughout the film). The gritty 16mm presentation, the poisoned love-letter to Madrid’s urban banality, digressions on the nature of performance, and the professional social contract all bump up against dramatic Shakespearian mainstays of betrayal, murder, sex, and revenge.



Does Lucia go from miserable and oppressed, to liberated creature of the night, and femme fatale? Sort of, yes. The journey is surprisingly complicated one, with the filmmaking never scrimping on an interesting detail or aside. It is occasionally a bit didactic, or meta, while at the same time, it swirls a limited cast of characters into the number of striking coincidences, that underscore this point.

These are sure to raise an eyebrow, perhaps even test the tolerance of the audience. But that is kind of the point here. As Grant Mazzy, the articulate and baritone radio host in Canada’s semiotic zombie-horror-comedy, Pontypool, asks, “So, what does it mean? It means something is going to happen. Something big. But then, something is always about to happen.”

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Something Is About To Happen premieres today on FILM MOVEMENT+.