By Haoran Xia
Pubshlied on: DeepFocus
May 8, 2021
Rodrigo Sorogoyen is not only a director, but, more importantly, an observer. In Stockholm, he fixes his gaze on intimate relationships, exploring how young people in a vast, boundless metropolis define sex and search for love while wandering through the urban maze. In The Kingdom, this sharp and deeply analytical filmmaker turns his attention to Spain’s own political and social landscape, relentlessly dismantling contemporary political systems, dissecting political actors while condemning the darkness behind power and the fragility of public trust. And in Riot Police, Sorogoyen once again plays to his strengths, continuing his exploration of society, politics, law, and human nature. Drawing from real political events in Spain, he sketches out a fictional, anti-utopian political blueprint filled with riots, suspicion, guilt, and despair, telling a story that feels distant and untouchable, yet is intimately tied to our everyday lives.
In 2019, when Sorogoyen began filming Riot Police in Madrid, he could not have known that the social tragedies unfolding one after another in the series, and its relentless questioning of public institutions, would soon mirror real-world spectacles almost scene for scene in the present. The social events and contradictions of human nature that inspired the show resurfaced once again in the public eye. Through the small screen, the story of six riot police officers left another heavy, indelible mark on our collective life. More importantly, in the post-pandemic era—when everything appears deceptively calm—the series strikes at our nerves, forcing us to revisit the question that people around the world have been asking since 2020: what, exactly, has gone wrong with this society?
“These police officers confront riots during the day and solve problems with violence—but how do they come home at night and sit peacefully with their families?” Sorogoyen said in an interview with Variety, revealing the core of his creative impulse. This question can be traced back to the Catalan protests of 2018. At the end of that year, large-scale demonstrations erupted after Madrid opposed Barcelona’s independence movement, escalating through prolonged clashes with police forces and resulting in one of the deadliest social tragedies Spain had seen in decades. Sorogoyen transplants this social reality directly into Riot Police.
The series opens with a six-man riot police unit carrying out a forced eviction. During the operation, a Senegalese man accidentally falls to his death, igniting outrage within the local community—anger directed not only at the six officers, but at the entire police system. Meanwhile, Laia, an internal affairs officer, is assigned to investigate the incident and uncover what really happened. The main storyline unfolds alongside a parallel narrative; the two threads intertwine, gradually exposing the political puzzle behind the eviction. What emerges is a chilling truth: the operation was part of a profit-driven scheme orchestrated by Madrid’s political elite. Old residential buildings across the city are demolished and transformed into hotels, the city itself held tightly in the palms of a few powerful figures. Each building becomes a grid on a chess board, and the six ordinary riot police officers—unaware of their role—are reduced to pawns, puppets manipulated at will by invisible hands of power.
Unlike many political dramas, Riot Police anchors its perspective firmly in the lives of ordinary people. As Sorogoyen himself has said, this is a series about exposing the hidden mechanics of society, and at the same time, a series about fundamental human nature. It begins with a family board game: in a wide-angle shot, Laia’s slightly distorted face clashes sharply with her relatives, immediately revealing her extraordinary political sensitivity. Within five minutes, her core personality is fully established. The scene then cuts to a laid-back police station parking lot, where Osorio and the six members of Unit 93 smoke, chat, and joke—completely unaware of the political abyss they are about to enter. Everything feels mundane, almost banal. But once the team arrives at the eviction site and forcibly enters homes to disperse resisting residents, that sense of normalcy shatters. Sweat, screams, waves of riots, and countless electronic screens fracture reality into shards of glass, destroying everything the six officers once knew.
After the incident, both their professional and private lives are hijacked by public opinion and the consequences of the case. They become pariahs among colleagues, thorns in their superiors’ eyes, and darlings of the media. Exhausted by work and overwhelmed in their personal lives, the intimacy they once shared with partners and families is gradually replaced by pent-up anger and emotional collapse. In a short span of time, these six ordinary riot police officers fall into unprecedented darkness. What eventually breaks that darkness and gestures toward dawn is the absolute trust and brotherhood among them. Isolated under relentless social pressure and personal despair, they become each other’s only support—much like Schofield and Blake in 1917, bound together by survival, evolving into vessels that carry one another toward fate’s distant shore. Unit 93 lives in a similar state: behind their hardened exteriors, chaos reigns within, yet they hold the line for themselves and their comrades, mission after mission, behind layers of riot shields.
Beyond their brotherhood, what feels most immersive is their naked vulnerability and helplessness. In reality, police officers are often seen as guardians of social order, burdened with immense responsibility and flattened by stereotypes—“strong,” “unyielding,” embodiments of traditional masculinity. These labels obscure inner lives and erase a fundamental truth of humanity: shared fragility. Distracted silences at family gatherings, arguments with spouses, late-night phone calls to friends, self-destructive drinking and drug use—these emotionally driven, destructive behaviors are laid bare throughout the series. They fill the other fifty percent of these characters, stripping away rigid masculine archetypes and exposing the emptiness and humiliation that surface at night, after daytime strength has been exhausted. At its core, Riot Police is a series about basic human nature.
It is also worth considering that the role of the police became deeply ambiguous during the social upheavals of 2020. They were cast as bearers of racial violence, while the ideals of justice and moral authority traditionally associated with the profession steadily eroded. In Scorsese’s films, police figures have always occupied a moral gray zone; Hong Kong classics like Infernal Affairs and Police Story similarly situate law enforcement in a liminal space. Riot Police is no exception. Cornered, with every path in life seemingly blocked, the six officers gradually drift from the side of justice toward corruption, attempting to survive in darkness in hopes of eventually returning to the light. There is no simple right or wrong here—only survival or annihilation. Justice contains evil; black and white bleed into each other; and as humans, making mistakes is part of staying alive. Sorogoyen never delivers a definitive verdict on the profession, but in the spaces between the story, especially in this post-pandemic moment, we are left to contemplate what the police truly mean to us, and to society at large.
Laia, who displays uncommon courage and obsession from the very beginning, relentlessly follows her intuition and sense of justice, seeking answers for the six officers and for a morally distorted society. Though she is an ordinary person, her actions and logic pull everyone else along, step by step, toward the truth behind the political conspiracy. Her character echoes Carrie Mathison from Homeland: forceful, stubborn, hyper-sensitive to politics, fiercely effective—and undeniably extreme. Many political dramas struggle with writing “strong female leads,” often funneling them into similar molds. Laia’s power lies in the fact that she, too, becomes a casualty of the political game, another puppet. Her grand, idealistic sense of justice is gradually worn down through confrontations with those in power. It never disappears, but her methods diversify; she learns to step into darkness to win. This organic character evolution expands the series’ dimensions and becomes a prism through which we can reflect on our own adult growth. Perhaps we are all Laia: holding onto an original hope, even as life forces us to take shortcuts we never imagined—without ever fully letting that hope go.
Beyond its gripping narrative and richly drawn characters, Riot Police stands out for Sorogoyen’s distinctive visual language and the long, polysyllabic Spanish dialogues that shape its rhythm. In the first five episodes, the camera lingers on extreme close-ups, often using wide-angle lenses that distort faces, as if the tension and crisis embedded in the story are etched directly onto the characters’ features. The pacing is tight, relentless, with no wasted moments; the camera weaves fluidly between characters, capturing every flicker of emotion and constructing deeply human, multi-layered portraits. Handheld cinematography and high-definition shots establish two contrasting emotional registers: the documentary-like handheld footage in the first five episodes objectively records the riots, pulling us back into Spain in 2018, as if we are witnessing rare internal unrest firsthand; the final episode’s stabilized HD imagery calms the emotional current, presenting a completed questionnaire—an answer, a closure. The most visceral scenes are the three riots themselves: the eviction, the protest march, and the football-night brawl. Filmed entirely handheld, the trembling images create an overwhelming sense of immediacy, turning viewers into primary witnesses as each apocalyptic eruption bursts through the screen, again and again jolting our adrenaline.
In the end, Diego is reassigned as a security guard, Osorio moves into an office role, the rest of Unit 93 remain riot police, and Laia returns home to reunite with her family, echoing the opening scene. Everything appears to return to normal; fractured lives seem mended, everyone drifting back onto their respective tracks. But is that really the case?
This is a series about human nature, and equally, a series about social order and the private “binary systems” each person carries within. Every character runs endlessly between the poles of justice and corruption, crossing moral lines, breaking rules, betraying their inner compass. They believe they are defending order, playing universal heroes—unaware that one misstep has already placed them at the edge of a cliff. During a negotiation, Diego tells Laia, “Just thinking that I’m contributing to social order makes me feel satisfied.” But whose order is that—Diego’s, or the politicians’? He doesn’t know. Neither do we. In the end, carving a heroic path through chaos is one thing; toppling an immovable mountain of power is another entirely.
作者：夏浩然
发表于：深焦DeepFocus
二零二一 五月八日
罗德里戈·索罗戈延是一名导演，更是一位观察者。在《斯德哥尔摩》中，罗德里戈将观察点聚焦于两性关系，探讨在硕大无边的都市中，当代年轻人如何在都市迷宫中定义性，寻找爱情；在《王国》里，这位敏感且思辨能力极强的导演将观察对象转移至西班牙本国政治和社会上，不断地拆解当代西班牙政治体系，解剖政治对象的同时批判政治背后的黑暗和社会公信的无力；而在《防暴警察》里，罗德里戈再一次发挥他的长处，继续他在社会、政治、法治和人性等主题上的探索，基于西班牙本国真实政治事件，勾勒出充满暴动、猜疑、罪恶和绝望的虚拟反乌托邦政治蓝图，为我们讲述一个触手不可及，却与我们生活息息相关的故事。2019年，罗德里戈刚开始在马德里拍摄《防暴警察》时，他并不知道在不远的将来，《防暴警察》里接连发生的社会惨案和对公共体系的无限质疑会与现实生活中的马戏一一对应，启发他创造这部剧的社会事件和人性本身的矛盾论再一次映入群众眼帘，六位防暴警察的故事通过小荧幕媒介的传递，在我们的生活中再一次滑下浓墨重彩的一笔，更重要的，在后疫情时代，当一切看似风平浪静时，刺激着我们的神经，引发我们再次思考着2020年至今全球民众都在不停思考的问题——这个社会，到底怎么了？
“这些警察白天在外面对社会暴动，用武力解决问题，那么到了晚上他们是怎么安安心心陪家人的呢？这是我一直都十分感兴趣的问题。”在一次与Variety的采访中，罗德里戈透露道自己的创作初衷。而这一思考点则要追溯到2018年的加泰罗尼亚暴乱。2018年年底，加泰罗尼亚因马德里反对巴塞罗那独立而发生了规模庞大的社会抗议，而后在与警察武装力量的持续冲突下逐渐升温，造成了近几十年以来西班牙国内伤亡最大的社会性悲剧。这一社会现实责备罗德里戈移花接木至《防暴警察》里。
《防暴警察》开始于一个六人防暴小队执行一次强制拆迁任务，但在任务执行过程中，一名塞内加尔黑人意外坠楼身亡，由此引发了当地社区对这六名防暴警察，或者说对整个警署体系的不满和愤怒。同时，警署局内务部职员莱娅被调动至该案子上，调查拆迁任务的前因后果。主线顺势发展，次线紧跟其后，两条剧情线相辅相衬，拆迁任务背后的政治谜题被一点一点揭开，原来，此次拆迁任务是马德里政府高层获得大笔利益的步骤之一，布满马德里各个街道的旧房屋逐一被拆迁改造为酒店，整个马德里被这几位高官掌控在手心，一栋栋房屋犹如围棋棋盘上的网格，而这六名普普通通的防暴警察无意识中被设定为棋子，犹如牵线木偶，被隐藏在高处的政治权力之手肆意摆弄。
与其他政治类剧集相比，《防暴警察》从始至终将故事的第一视觉嫁接在一群普通人之上。正如罗德里戈本人所说——这是一部关于揭露社会背后运转逻辑的剧集，也是一部关于展现基本人性的剧集。剧集开始于一场家庭桌游，广角镜头下稍显变形的莱娅在与家人针锋相对中，我们便能察觉到莱娅天赋异禀的政治敏感度，短短五分钟内，莱娅的第一性格则被塑造成熟。随后镜头切换至懒散随意的警察局停车场，由奥索里奥带领的93小队的六名防暴警察们抽着烟，聊着家常，殊不知自己将踏进怎样的政治深渊。一切的一切都看似十分平常，而当93小队到达拆迁地点，强行进入居民住宅驱散反抗居民时，过往的平常在警察的汗水里，防抗群众的嘶吼中，一波又一波的暴动和无数电子屏幕中分崩离析，被撕成玻璃渣大小的碎片，毁灭了六名警察的所有。事故发生后，六名警察的私人生活与工作纷纷被该事件的后续影响和社会舆论所挟持，他们成为了同事们的唾弃对象，上司的眼中钉，媒体的“宠儿”，每天的工作让他们的精疲力竭，私人生活变成一团糟，无处发泄的消极情绪和暴躁脾气渐渐替代家庭和爱人之间本该有的亲密无间，霸占了亲密关系中的所有角落，一时之间，六名普通的防暴警察陷入前所未有的黑暗，而逐渐打破黑暗，构建黎明的正是六人之间的绝对信任和兄弟情谊。在无尽的独自一人面对社会压力和对抗悲观情绪中，这六个人成为了彼此唯一的臂膀和依靠，好比《1917》中的史考菲和布雷克，两人相依为命，相互守卫，任务成为了时时刻刻中两人的唯一，彼此进化成协助对方抵达命运彼岸的方舟，而命悬一线的93小队也是如此。拆迁任务后的一次次任务中，他们刚强的外壳守护着心乱如麻的内核，在一道道防护线后坚守住自己和队友的底线。
除开六人之间的兄弟情谊，更具代入感的则是他们透明的脆弱和无力。警察在现实中被看作社会基本秩序的维持者和守护者，被赋予如此重任，社会意识常常会将其标签化，为其贴上“坚韧”等传统男性标签，为我们树立固化的刻板印象，该刻板印象不仅不利于我们进一步体察角色内心，更泯灭掉人性种种的一种——人类共享的脆弱性。家庭聚会上的心不在焉，与妻子的争吵，深夜给朋友打电话诉苦，甚至是自毁性的酗酒、吸毒行为，这些极受消极情绪控制的毁灭性行为在剧集中一一得以陈列，填满六名警察的另外百分之五十，丰满了人物本身的多重性格，去掉社会中秉持的“传统男性”标签，展现白天在外坚强的同时，赤裸裸地揭露夜晚在家的卑微和空洞，毕竟到底，这是一部关于基本人性的剧集。
值得思考的是，警察这个职业在2020年的社会变故中也变得模凌两可，他们变成了种族罪恶的承担者，而该职业应有的正义感和道德模范感在时间的作用下被逐渐消减。斯科塞斯电影里的警察至始至终是灰色人物；《无间道》，《警察故事》等知名的香港警匪电影也一直将警察这个职业放置在中间位置，《防暴警察》也毫不例外。在走投无路，生活各个方向被死死封锁后，我们看到六名警察也逐渐从本该有的正义一方投向腐败一方，尝试在黑色领域里寻找一条生路，重新带领他们回归正义领域，而这没有正确与错误之分，只有生存与灭绝，因为正义背后也有邪恶，因为黑白交替，也因为作为人，错误是生存之道。罗德里戈在剧集中没有十分明确点明对于该职业的探讨，但在故事缝隙之间，我们能体会到，特别是在当下的后疫情时代，通过剧集的描绘，警察这个职业对于我们而言，对于社会而言，有着怎样的特殊意义。
从一开始便展现出常人不具备的勇气和执念的莱娅，始终跟随直觉和正义的脚步，想为这六名警察或已经扭曲的社会道义一个答案。莱娅同样是一个普通人，但她的行为和思路一直牵引着剧集中的所有人，一步步走向政治谜题背后的答案。莱娅的塑造与《国土安全》中的凯莉有异曲同工之妙——强势，固执，对政治极度敏感，执行力惊人，同样十分偏激。大部分政治类剧集对于“大女主”的塑造似乎遇到瓶颈，纷纷朝一个方向刻画人物形象。莱娅的惊喜之处在于她不知不觉也成为了政治游戏的牺牲品，或者说牵线木偶，她起初伟大又宏伟的正义感在与高层政治的较量中被一点点泯灭，不过强大的正义感仍在，只是方法论不再单一，莱娅也学会了投向黑色领域获取胜利。这类自发性的角色成长是拓宽剧集维度的工具，也是我们反思自身，折射我们成人后成长历程的菱镜。或许我们都是莱娅，我们始终怀揣着停留在初心里的那份期盼，不过世事难以预料，我们学会了开辟新的捷径，但我们从来没有丢弃那份期盼。
除开引人入胜的故事情节和丰满立体的人物角色，罗德里戈别具一格的镜头语言和西班牙语那多音节构建的长对话也是令该剧出众的原因。剧集中前五集的大部分人物拍摄都是面部特写，且用到许多广角镜头使之变形、扭曲，仿佛故事本身含有的紧张情绪和危机不安都呈现在所有人物脸上。前五集的故事节奏十分紧凑，毫不拖泥带水，一环接一环，镜头全方位在所有角色之间切换，所有人的情绪都逃不过镜头的捕捉，具象的情感流露刻画了更多面，更真实的角色形象。手持与高清的摄影手法也为剧集奠定了两种不同的情感基调，前五集纪录片式的手持摄影客观地记录着现场暴乱的一切，仿佛将我们带回到2018年的西班牙，亲自目睹西班牙长年难见的内乱；最后一集的高清摄影稳定整体情绪，呈现出一份已经回答的问卷，告知观众此时此刻，一切即将步入尾声。全剧最为纪实的场面，则是那三次暴乱：第一次是拆迁任务的执行，第二次是广场游行秩序的维护，第三次则是足球球赛之夜的混战。三次暴乱分别用手持摄影进行拍摄，持续抖动的画面营造出现场的真实感，在该视觉冲击下，观众成为了现场的第一观察者，每一次暴乱的末世氛围冲出屏幕，无数次刺激着我们的肾上腺素。
剧集结尾，迭戈调职担任保安，奥索里奥开始在办公室工作，93小队其他人仍保留原位，继续担任防暴警察，莱娅则在家里，首尾呼应，与家人团聚。一切看似都恢复正常，每个人曾被撕裂的生活也终于得到修补，大家各奔西东，回到正轨，但事实如此吗？这是一部关于人性的剧集，同样，这也是一部关于社会秩序和每个人独自的“二分法”的剧集。剧集里的所有人物在正义与腐败这两个大圆里来回奔跑，他们一次次跨越道德红线，一次次打破传统规则，也一次次背叛自我内心，也许他们的道德观警告着他们向右走，但处于现实中的他们跟随自己的欲念向左走，以为自己保护着社会秩序，充当着普世英雄，却不知一步走错，后背已临近悬崖。迭戈在一次谈判中对莱娅说：“我想到我在为社会的秩序贡献一份力我就很知足。”但这所谓的秩序是迭戈眼中的秩序还是政治高层的秩序？他不知道，我们也无从解答。到底，个人英雄披荆斩棘，拯救社会于淤泥之中是一回事，推不倒的权力大山却是另一回事。