José Ovejero

A family—father, mother, and son—has just arrived for vacation in a seaside town. They've rented their dream home and car. As they cruise slowly down the town's main street in their red convertible Mercedes, moving through a summer-clad crowd squeezed between two rows of market stalls, the boy steals a straw hat from a homeless man.

The boy and his parents pay little mind to this spontaneous, almost innocent gesture. Yet it is this very trifle that, step by step, sets off events that charge the atmosphere with tension. Or perhaps it merely exposes a threat that was already lurking: within the conflicts brewing beneath the surface of the family's seemingly peaceful life, in the boy's mounting unease, and in the obsession that drives the vagrant to break into the newcomers' holiday home.

In Bajo la luna negra, everything unfolds beyond the point of no return, leaving us unable to explain why the characters' seemingly most inconsequential choices relentlessly push them toward a tragedy that is, all at once, catastrophe and salvation.