‘Saints’ review: Rising star Victoria Luengo brings spiky energy to uneven Spanish heist thriller

Dir. Mikel Gurrea. Spain/Italy. 2026. 104mins

Basque writer-director Mikel Gurrea spins a piece of Spanish wordplay into a sly thriller premise in his second feature, The Spanish title Sants is the name of a Barcelona neighbourhood, but it also means ‘saints’ – the stock in trade of the group of thieves at the heart of the film, who steal religious artefacts, but also the surprising epithet that might be applied to this ambivalent crew. The Catalan-language film doesn’t quite sustain its transition from melodrama to full-blown heist movie, but it’s an elegant, playful affair.

Never manages to push its heist dimension quite as urgently as its set-up promises

Premiering in San Sebastian competition, Saints may well lead to higher-profile international work for Gurrea (a 2022 Screen Spain Star Of Tomorrow). It also consolidates a 2026 as a breakthrough year for its up-and-coming star Victoria Luengo, who made a big splash in Cannes this year in both the ensemble cast of Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas and in a dysfunctional father-daughter duo with Javier Bardem in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved. (Spanish audiences will also know her from Sorogoyen’s TV cop drama Riot Police). Luengo’s spiky, charistmatic performance here should give Saints some traction beyond its festival berths; it will next play Chicago before releasing in Spain in February through Elastic Films. 

Here, Luengo (who also starred in Gurrea’s acclaimed 2022 debut Suro (Cork)), plays Lali, short for Eulàlia, a young working-class woman with a penchant for theft and gambling. Her free-spirit ways are curtailed when she must care for her seriously ill mother Gloria (Spanish eminence Ariadna Gil, whose filmography includes Belle Epoque and Pan’s Labyrinth). Exploring a hospital chapel, Lali decides to walk off with the statue of a saint – and soon discovers that there exists a specialist market in such artifacts; one especially successful concern being run by a woman named Rosario, which appropriately translates as ‘rosary’ (Eulàlia Ramon).

Rosario, it turns out, is a former nun, whose indomitable character has made her a very respected figure in the Sants neighbourhood, where she is regarded as a healer. Rosario helps Lali and Gloria, which only puts the young woman more in thrall to Rosario as a boss – with the young woman’s talents and loyalty eventually put to the test when the gang targets a major haul in a cathedral city. 

Like Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, Saints has its roots in a genuine strain of specialist criminal activity, but follows the theme in unexpected directions – in this case, in ways which just about manage not to strain incredulity. Much of the film depends on us believing in Rosario, the hard-edged gang matron with a tender core and a sense of social responsibility. A sort of Mama Robin Hood among crooked antiquaries, she points out that traditional church Catholicism is dying out in Spain, while the money made from trafficking the saints can make a genuine difference in the home community. 

Lali’s relation to Rosario is as a needy but rebellious daughter to an imperious surrogate mother, and Luengo rings the changes on the part with compelling energy. Playing younger, in spirit if not in years, than her recent Almodóvar or Sorogoyen roles, she makes Lali a spiky but vulnerable gangling mean-gamine, with an array of quizzical and contemptuous facial expressions – and perhaps a touch of early Patti Smith, especially when drunk on the thrill of ever more audacious, impertinent, not to say sacrilegious saint-nappings. 

The film is uneven, never managing to push its heist dimension quite as urgently as its set-up promises, but Gurrea manages to combine dramatic tension with slow-building narrative looseness; all the better to let Luengo crackle – solo, in the thieves’ ensemble, or in duo (faintly sapphic-shaded, perhaps) with Ramon’s leather-tough apostate. Julián Elizalde’s photography richly thickens the atmosphere, especially in the Barcelona nightscapes, adding more than a dash of Goyaesque intensity to the cathedral spaces and to Laia Serra’s design for Eulalia’s cavernous secret storeroom of saints. And, Valentina Magaletti contributes a propulsively distinctive score, throbbing with percussion and buzzing with metallic guitar and other effects.