All the Names of God (2023)

All the Names of God grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go, turning an ordinary working man’s day into a nerve-tightening sprint through a city that suddenly feels like a pressure cooker. Daniel Calparsoro directs with meticulous, street-level urgency, keeping the action clean and propulsive while letting the tension build in waves rather than cheap jolts. Luis Tosar anchors the film with a performance that’s all raw humanity under impossible stress, and Inma Cuesta brings a grounded counterweight that adds compassion to the momentum instead of slowing it down. It’s a lean, frenetic thriller with a serious pulse—if you’re sensitive to terrorism-related stories it may hit too close, but if you want a smart, tightly made ride that still remembers the people inside the spectacle, it’s absolutely worth the trip.

All the Names of God wants to be a tight, ticking-clock Madrid thriller with a very human center: an ordinary taxi driver trapped in an extraordinary nightmare. The problem is it often plays like a well-drilled exercise in genre mechanics—efficient chases, procedural beats, familiar twists—rather than a story that digs deeply into the moral and emotional fallout it hints at. If you’re tired of terrorism thrillers that feel derivative or you need characters and themes to be explored with real nuance, this may leave you cold. That said, it’s competently directed, keeps the tension moving, and Luis Tosar brings enough grounded panic to make the ride watchable if you’re mainly here for suspense over introspection.