Making wonderful use of classic noir tropes, Josep Maria Forn’s Los culpables (US: The Guilty) establishes the noir atmosphere from the first shot: throughout the opening credits, a mysterious, raincoat-clad woman sneaks anxiously through the wet, dark Barcelona streets until she arrives at the bright light of her home and husband, a clear indication that she’s uneasily straddling two different worlds. The woman is Arlette Ibáñez (Susana Campos), her husband is shady businessman Pablo Ibáñez (Tomás Blanco), and her extramarital lover is her husband’s own doctor, Andrés Laplaza (Yves Massard). Ibáñez’s business is about to go bankrupt, so he proposes a deal: he’ll fake his death to collect the life insurance and split the payout with Arlette and Laplaza if the doctor signs the fake death certificate. What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything. Traveling through resentments, revelations, exhumations, and blackmail, the plot twists its way through the 90-minute runtime against a backdrop of anxiety exaggerated by Forn’s use of innovative framing in countless shots. Trivia note: the Spanish wife in the source novel was recast as a Frenchwoman to appease the Franco regime censors who apparently rejected the idea of an immoral Spaniard.