Laia Costa

Some way into the night in Victoria (2015), a Spanish woman who has fallen in with four Berlin strangers unlocks the café where she has to be at seven, sits down at the piano and plays, properly. Then she tells the boy who followed her in that she spent years at a conservatoire before being told she would never be good enough. Laia Costa's face barely moves while she says it. That is the thing she does that most actors do not: she delivers the sentence that explains a person without underlining it, and leaves us to notice. We had written the film off as a lark by then, and that scene got at us more than we expected, because nothing about how she played it asked us to be moved.

Sebastian Schipper shot Victoria in one unbroken 138-minute take, much of it improvised, in the bad English of a woman with no German and men with no Spanish. It is an unfair test for an actor: there is no cut to hide behind, and Costa is on screen from the dance floor to the getaway car. She begins giggling and game and ends with a face that has stopped registering anything, and we see every step between. She has said the camera on that shoot was a pistol telling her not to lie, and that is more or less the method she has kept.

The career before it was Spanish television, Bandolera and Polseres vermelles, in supporting and episodic parts; she started at 26, after a life in advertising, and has said that beginning as an adult let her work on her own terms. The career after went first to English-language independents, Newness (2017) and Life Itself (2018), and then back to Spain, where Lullaby (2022), with her as a new mother called Amaia, and Isabel Coixet's Un amor (2023) brought her the reputation at home she already had abroad. Television has given her a villain, Moghedien in The Wheel of Time (2023). The pattern across all of it is women mid-change: new to a city, new to a child, new to a life they have not chosen.

The method has a cost. Realism that fine depends on the film around it, and in the last half hour of Victoria, when the script asks her to go along with a plan no sane person would, her stillness cannot cover the gap; she can make us believe a face, not a decision. She does not push back against a screenplay, which is a virtue in Schipper's hands and, we suspect, less of one in others. Isabel Coixet has now made two films with her and Alauda Ruiz de Azúa one; directors who like a slow room seem to find her.

Next comes Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026), which will be the first time she has shared a frame with something less expressive than she is. Start with Victoria, stay for the café, and then see whether the Spanish films are as good as Spain says.