Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Tercer Grado is without a doubt the best 2015 Spanish Thriller. With almost no budget and an amazingly young cast and crew (24 years old average), this team showed to the Spanish industry that miracles do exist and that you can film an excellent movie if you put all your love and energy into it. They won multiple national and international awards, but what is more important, they made happy the audience offering an action thriller film that will take your breath away. Geoffrey Cowper did a great job directing and Jesus Lloveras and Sara Casasnovas delivered an outstanding performance. When I go to a movie theater I expect to be entertained, this film exceed my expectations more than entertained, I became a fan of the entire cast and crew and as a filmmaker myself I'll try to hire talented Lloveras and Casasnovas for my next production before they become so big that I won't be able to afford them.

I saw this at a film festival, and went in not knowing anything about it, not having heard any word-of-mouth reviews. (Ironically, it turned out I had actually met the film maker and actor-charming blokes-at a documentary screening the day before, but not recognized the Spanish name of their film as one I was going to see).The movie is all around well-done: an intelligent script, good characters, nicely filmed and acted. The main character is all the more interesting for being not easily pigeon-holed--is he good, is he bad, are you going to root for or against him? I really liked it, and found myself thinking about it afterwards. It has a propulsive feel, though, set in about a 24 hour period, and has both a lot of tension, and enough action, that it kept us sitting upright in the midst of a five-film day.At the Q and A afterwards, the Spanish film maker was asked why the villains were French. he explained that the logical escape route was north to France, and they knew they wanted that "chase" element in the film, so it made sense to have French bad guys. He added that having made that decision, they did give the villains names of their French friends!