From the opening moments, when two lovers flee an accident in the Spanish countryside, a sense of doom bears down on every scene in Juan Antonio Bardem’s masterful Muerte de un ciclista (US: Death of a Cyclist). The couple — middle-aged geometry professor Juan Fernández Soler (Alberto Closas) and married socialite María José de Castro (Lucia Bosé) — are having an affair, and a police report would cause a scandal in the powerful social circles that surround Maria and her industrialist husband Miguel (Otello Toso). When they later learn the cyclist has died of his injuries, guilt and fear take over to divide them, especially when the parasitic (and presumably gay) gossipmonger Rafael (Carlos Casaravilla) threatens to expose them (“Now the fun starts”). Produced under the Franco dictatorship, the film reveals the psychological horror that often dangles between morality and materialism; Bardem cleverly contrasts the couple’s upper-class, privileged environs with the gritty, restless slum in which the cyclist had lived. (About the war’s aftermath Juan laments “all the guys like me left hollow inside who will never believe in anything again”). Amid the gloom are stunning sequences and compositions of nighttime cobblestone streets, an enormous, dark conference room in which Juan’s student protests her grade, and a marvelous round-the-table scene in which Rafael whispers his poison into willing ears. Don’t expect a happy ending.