The best Spanish film of 2025 has just arrived on Netflix — and it’s impossible to remain indifferent

Between the dream of transforming the world and the harsh reality of the sacrifices that this requires, a conflict arises: to what extent is it worth losing yourself in defending an idea? Personal sacrifice in the name of a good cause can be seen as a gesture of nobility, but one always pays a high price for wanting a less ordinary life. Under given circumstances, idealists die for their principles and beliefs, but they also feed the worms far from awakening the slightest hint of compassion for their failed utopias. The line between heroism and chimera is thin, as seen in “A Ghost in Battle”. The desire to keep a flame of altruism burning amidst the insanity that rages everywhere is obvious in the film by Spaniard Agustín Díaz Yanes, even though the methods by which people try to reach paradise on Earth involve violence and bloodshed. The director-writer rereads a painful chapter in the history of his country with ambitions that go beyond dramatic art, a choice capable of stirring passions of different natures.

In seventeen years, between 1958, when it was founded, and 1975, ETA killed 44 people. During the 1980s, with the redemocratization process that followed the government of dictator Francisco Franco (1892-1975), the group claimed four hundred victims in attacks in cafes and shopping malls. This escalation of the faction’s destructive potential, following a dissent in which some of the members chose not to abandon their weapons, took on uncontrollable proportions, mainly due to the romantic extremism of these guerrillas, certain that in the near future they would achieve their utopia. They pursue the dream of a Basque Country independent of Spain, and to achieve this they are willing to do anything. Orphaned by her father and mother since the age of sixteen and with a degree in philology, Amaya Mateos Gines changes her name and agrees to infiltrate the sympathizers of what was left of the ETA, a smaller but also ruinous army, in the wake of the assassination of Gregorio Ordóñez (1958-1995), president of the Spanish Popular Party in the Autonomous Community. Yanes crafts political commentary with subtlety, introducing younger audiences to the twelve years of terror to come. From 1992 to 2004, Franco’s atavistic specter seems to have incarnated in his tormentors, provoking a tyranny with a changed signal.

Mixing fear and courage, Susana Abaitua’s performance keeps the film hot. Abaitua takes great care in each speech, giving veracity to a story that could even have been real. The supporting cast, headed by Raúl Arévalo and Andrés Gertrúdix, highlights the idea of ​​espionage and the death of innocents as political expedients that are here to stay and whose combat can never let up.