The mental illness of the long-distance runner

The general shot of an athletics track constitutes the inaugural image of Corredora, the stimulating opera prima by director Laura García Alonso, awarded at the Malaga Festival. As the credits appear, a female figure runs on the track until, after two laps, she stops exhausted. From its beginning, the film opts for the staging of physical effort and the search for the limits of bodily (and mental) endurance as the backbone of its narrative and visual proposal. The camera soon abandons the safety distance provided by this initial general shot to approach, dizzyingly, the continuously moving body of its protagonist, Cris (Alba Sáez, fantastic), a high-performance athlete for whom running and competing are substitutes for life.

Like her protagonist, García Alonso sprints swiftly, and without losing a second, towards the revelation of the conflict: Cris's psychotic break makes the first fifteen minutes of the film a model example of a tense psychological thriller. From here, and until its moving conclusion, the film navigates between recognizable intimate realism (the complex and beautiful relationship between Cris and her sister, which perhaps could have been developed further) and the rigorous portrayal, both empathetic and brutal, of a female subjectivity devastated by mental illness.