General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

No Habrá Paz para los Malvados

No habrá paz para los malvados (international title: No Rest for the Wicked) is a 2011 Spanish police thriller directed by Enrique Urbizu, written by Urbizu with Michel Gaztambide, and starring José Coronado as Santos Trinidad, a corrupt, alcoholic Madrid police inspector who becomes involved in a triple murder and hunts the sole witness while a judge investigates the same crime.¹ The film won six Goya awards from fourteen nominations, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for Coronado.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Enrique Urbizu (Bilbao, 1962); screenplay by Urbizu and Michel Gaztambide¹
Lead cast	José Coronado (Santos Trinidad), Helena Miquel (Judge Chacón), Rodolfo Sancho (Rodolfo), Juanjo Artero (Leiva)¹
Release	Spain, 23 September 2011; distributed by Warner Bros Entertainment Spain¹
Runtime	118 minutes per Cineuropa; some Spanish sources list 104 minutes¹^•³
Goya awards	6 wins from 14 nominations: Best Film, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Editing, Sound²
Festival	Official competition, San Sebastián Film Festival 2011¹
Production	Telecinco Cinema, LaZona Producciones, Manto Films; international sales by Filmax¹^•²

Spoilers

Plot

On an ordinary Sunday in Madrid, the police inspector Santos Trinidad, on his way home and heavily drunk, becomes involved in a shooting that leaves three dead. A witness escapes and could incriminate him, so Trinidad begins his own investigation to find and eliminate the witness.⁴ Meanwhile Judge Chacón, in charge of the official investigation of the triple crime, advances methodically in her search for the killer.⁴

What begins as an apparent drug-trafficking dispute turns out to conceal a far more dangerous conspiracy.⁴ The story leads Trinidad to the discovery and thwarting of a terrorist attack modeled on the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004, and the film is set around 2004.⁵^•⁶ Critics noted that Urbizu's interest was not a reconstruction of the 11-M attacks but the police underworld around them; Carlos F. Heredero of Cahiers du Cinéma wrote that the film is about "the fissures left open by the security services".⁷

Production and title

The film marked Urbizu's return to feature directing after eight years, and his reunion with his habitual screenwriter Michel Gaztambide and with José Coronado, his recurring lead actor from Todo por la pasta, Cachito, and La caja 507.⁸^•³ The title comes from a verse of the Book of Isaiah that Urbizu encountered as an adolescent, heading Errol Flynn's autobiography; he carried the phrase for years before it found its film.⁹

The technical crew included cinematographer Unax Mendía, editor Pablo Blanco, and composer Mario de Benito.¹ Reviewers singled out the opening sequence, in which Coronado's character drifts through a night of drinking and violence, as the film's high point; Nuria Vidal of Fotogramas called those first fifteen minutes the best footage Urbizu had ever shot.⁷

Reception and awards

The film premiered in official competition at the San Sebastián festival in September 2011 and opened in Spanish theaters on 23 September 2011.¹ It became, in one critic's account, an immediate critical phenomenon while drawing a more tempered reaction from audiences.¹⁰ At the 2012 Goya ceremony it took six awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor for Coronado (his first Goya after 25 years in film), Best Editing for Pablo Blanco, and Best Sound.²^•¹¹ It also won Best Director at the Latin Beat Film Festival in Tokyo in 2012.¹²

Critical opinion divided over the supporting material. Quim Casas's SensaCine review rated the film 4.0 out of 5, praising Urbizu's concision, his way of filming violence, and Coronado's work, while faulting the subplot concerning the prosecutor's investigation.¹³ The aggregated press score on SensaCine was 3.6 out of 5.⁷ Pere Vall of Fotogramas argued that weakly defined secondary characters made the film rest entirely on the protagonist's solitary odyssey, while Alberto Bermejo of Metrópoli called its ending one of the most chilling and elegant in memory, not only in Spanish cinema.⁷ A cineycine review scored it 7.5 out of 10, crediting Coronado with a memorable antihero and judging the judicial subplot anodyne, and reported that Sylvester Stallone considered a Hollywood remake.¹⁴ On Abandomoviez, the most frequent user rating was 6 out of 10 across 147 reviews.¹⁵

Legacy

The film is studied as part of Urbizu's film noir cycle alongside La caja 507 (2002); the scholar María Pilar Rodríguez reads both as an ethically committed noir that denounces a corrupt and ineffective system, drawing on Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" and on Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman.¹⁶ It has also been cited as an early example of Spanish cinema's turn to corruption as a theme after the 2008 crisis.¹⁷

It remains Urbizu's most recent feature film; he has since directed television series including Las aventuras del Capitán Alatriste (2015), Gigantes (2018), and Libertad (2021), and has said that financing feature films had become difficult for him.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026