For the crew robbing a Madrid bank in 2013, getting inside depends on an elderly man trying to cash a fake €5 million lottery ticket. His distraction gives the operation its opening. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s Collision Course places this small fraud inside the aftermath of a much larger financial disaster, when banks had received public rescue while ordinary people faced lost savings and repossessed homes. The diversion has an abrasive comic logic: the institution is briefly occupied with someone claiming an improbable fortune while masked thieves search for wealth they believe is already there.
Their destination is a particular safety-deposit box, expected to contain diamonds. It is empty. They leave with money taken from other boxes, carrying disappointment into a getaway that should already count as a success. That distinction gives the robbery some useful specificity. These people have arrived with expectations that a handful of stolen cash cannot satisfy. The economic setting lends their actions an atmosphere of restitution, yet their willingness to raid neighboring boxes complicates any flattering account of the enterprise. Anger at financial wrongdoing and an appetite for personal enrichment can occupy the same car.
The crew’s professional identities make that discomfort sharper. Carla, Tomás, and Raúl are police officers; Pedro is retired. They possess institutional access alongside their grievances, and the investigation offers opportunities to conceal their involvement. A familiar image of ordinary citizens striking back at the bank becomes tangled with people exploiting the authority entrusted to them. Laia Costa, Tamar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes, and Karra Elejalde form an ensemble whose relationships matter as practical vulnerabilities. Affection, resentment, and professional knowledge determine what can be hidden and who might expose it.
Then an argument during the escape is interrupted by a collision that overturns their vehicle. The film follows the consequences until it appears to have spent its central predicament surprisingly early. Its next move requires a modest disclosure about the design: it returns to the accident and changes a decisive circumstance.
Further alternatives follow. Each rearrangement alters the aftermath while preserving the people and the connections that brought them to the bank. Sánchez Arévalo and co-writer Ramón Campos turn a getaway’s sudden interruption into a way of testing how circumstances redistribute guilt, advantage, and sympathy.
The useful international comparison is the British romantic drama Sliding Doors, with its alternative lives generated by a contingent event. Transported into this Spanish crime story, that device acquires a different relationship with power. Romantic possibility gives way to questions about who can control evidence and survive scrutiny.
The comparison also clarifies what the film is doing with repetition. These are alternative developments, rather than witnesses offering incompatible accounts of an unchanged incident. Knowledge gained in one version remains available to the audience as the next begins, allowing us to reassess conduct before the characters understand their own exposure.
The editing between perpetrators and investigators takes particular advantage of their overlapping identities. Police progress can threaten the robbers while giving them information they can use. This makes concealment an active source of suspense, since the pursuit is compromised from within.
The initial uncertainty about chronology becomes increasingly manageable as connections emerge; the film asks for attention and rewards a fair amount of it. A later version can reactivate an earlier discovery, changing its significance without needing to repeat its explanation. The pleasure lies in recognizing how a relationship that enabled the crime can become a liability afterward.
That accumulating knowledge creates an interesting problem for identification. Someone who appears callous in one set of circumstances may become vulnerable in another. Such changes deserve to be considered on their own terms. A person’s capacity for tenderness does not disappear because another version exposes self-preservation or cruelty. The actors maintain enough continuity for these possibilities to belong to recognizable individuals. The film is persuasive when it lets altered pressure reveal conduct that an earlier version had given us little reason to anticipate. Sympathy becomes provisional, with new evidence capable of disturbing it.
The difficulty is how briefly each version can inhabit what it reveals. Carla and Tomás’s strained partnership should make the criminal predicament intimate: concealment places demands on people whose trust is already damaged. Yet their relationship repeatedly competes with the need to establish another chain of consequences.
Costa and Novas must carry an existing fracture while the screenplay keeps redirecting our attention toward fresh information. We learn enough to understand why their attachment matters, but have less time to experience the changing burden placed upon it. The returns can interrupt emotional development at the point when discovery might have become sustained discomfort.
This limits the force of the financial setting, too. The empty box and the police connection make the robbery morally untidy, giving the film material beyond a simple revenge fantasy. The collision can produce another outcome; the financial crisis remains part of every version. The film’s continuing fascination with possible outcomes, however, draws attention toward the crew’s capacity to escape particular predicaments. Spain’s crisis remains legible as a source of resentment, while its personal consequences are frequently compressed into information explaining why someone participated.
Collision Course premiered globally on Netflix on October 30, 2026. Directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, the Spanish heist thriller follows a group of bank robbers whose getaway crash exposes hidden betrayals and long-standing lies.
Where to Watch Collision Course (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Collision Course (Spanish: Colisión)
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: October 30, 2026
Rating: 16+
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes (90 minutes)
Director: Daniel Sánchez Arévalo
Writers: Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Ramón Campos
Producers and Executive Producers: Ramón Campos
Cast: Laia Costa, Karra Elejalde, Luis Zahera, Tamar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes, Lluís Homar, Jorge Cabrera, Alba Fontecha
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Rafa García
The Review
Collision Course
Collision Course turns Spain’s financial resentment into an absorbing experiment in guilt and opportunity. Its police officers investigating their own crime give the branching narrative a sharp institutional tension, while the ensemble keeps changing behavior recognizably human. The repeated alternatives sustain curiosity, though Carla and Tomás’s damaged relationship needs time the plot keeps reclaiming. The financial crisis supplies persuasive motives without acquiring the same dramatic weight as the crew’s attempts to escape exposure.
PROS
- Inventive alternative-outcome structure.
- Suspense built around compromised investigators.
- Recognizable characters across changing scenarios.
- Morally complicated use of Spain’s financial crisis.
CONS
- Narrative resets interrupt emotional development.
- Economic hardship receives limited personal exploration.
