General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Method

The Method (Spanish: El método) is a 2005 Spanish-Argentine corporate thriller directed by Marcelo Piñeyro, in which seven candidates for a single executive post at a multinational company are locked in a Madrid boardroom and pushed through a ruthless psychological selection process known as the Grönholm Method. The screenplay, by Piñeyro and Mateo Gil, is a free adaptation of Jordi Galcerán's stage play El método Grönholm.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	El método, 2005; released in Spain on 23 September 2005²
Director and writers	Marcelo Piñeyro; screenplay by Piñeyro and Mateo Gil, based on the play by Jordi Galcerán Ferrer¹
Cast	Eduardo Noriega, Najwa Nimri, Eduard Fernández, Pablo Echarri, Ernesto Alterio, Carmelo Gómez, Adriana Ozores, and Natalia Verbeke³
Premise	Seven candidates (five men and two women) compete for one executive job at the multinational Dekia while anti-globalization protests fill the streets of Madrid²^•⁴
Runtime	115 minutes (35 mm); other listings give 105, 112, or 120 minutes¹^•⁵
Awards	Two Goya Awards in 2005: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Carmelo Gómez)³
Critical reception	72% Tomatometer from 18 reviews and 70% Popcornmeter from more than 10,000 ratings on Rotten Tomatoes⁶

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The action takes place almost entirely in the conference room of a skyscraper in the Azca office complex on Madrid's Paseo de la Castellana, while thousands of demonstrators and riot police fill the streets below during a day of protests against the International Monetary Fund.⁴^•⁷ Seven applicants of very different temperaments, described in promotional material as the winner, the aggressive one, the insecure woman, the critic, and the indecisive one, arrive for the final round of selection at the multinational Dekia.⁷

After signing a confidentiality clause, the candidates submit to the Grönholm Method, a fictitious selection procedure supposedly imported from the United States in which no evaluator is visibly present; a bank of computer screens and a smiling receptionist stand in for the absent assessors.¹^•⁸ The tests, which include choosing who among them would be least useful in a post-apocalyptic bunker, are designed so that the candidates eliminate one another, and the group gradually realizes that one of the seven is a company infiltrator.¹^•⁴ As the rounds continue, distrust hardens into psychological and sexual power play, and the last two contenders must weigh sentiment against the will to win.¹^•⁹

Interpretation

Academic readings place the film in the tradition of the huis clos, the sealed-room drama in the line of Hitchcock's Rope, Lumet's 12 Angry Men, and Foley's Glengarry Glen Ross, using a confined space as a social metaphor.⁸ The scholar Alfredo Dillon, of the Institute of Research at the Universidad Católica Argentina, reads El método and Piñeyro's later Las viudas de los jueves (2009) as a diptych on crisis seen from the upper middle class: the multinational corporation stands metonymically for neoliberal globalization, the selection process works as a Darwinian struggle, and the company appears as a bubble sealed off from the reality outside.¹⁶ Piñeyro filmed it between the Argentine crisis and the Spanish crisis, and the company in the film, Dekia, is of Nordic origin.¹⁶

From stage to screen

Galcerán's play El método Grönholm, written by the Barcelona playwright after five years of creative block, had run successfully on Spanish stages before Piñeyro adapted it.¹⁰ The adaptation is deliberately loose. Galcerán himself said that "the film has nothing to do with the play": most of the dialogue is different, the tone is more dramatic, there are new characters, and the ending bears no relation to the stage version.¹¹ What survives is the play's fierce critique of hyper-capitalism and the whodunit-style intrigue of the selection tests, which the Spanish critic Javier Ocaña compared to Agatha Christie's puzzles of who did what, and why.¹¹

Piñeyro, who had read the play before its premiere and said he was interested in the theme rather than the text, chose not to open the story out across multiple locations, the usual rule for filming a play.¹² He explained that he wanted to respect the theatrical space and to use a corporate selection process as "a metaphor of social behavior".²^•¹³

Production

Filming lasted a little over a month, from 8 November to 17 December 2004, at a studio on the outskirts of Madrid.⁸ Piñeyro shot with three cameras running simultaneously, in chronological order, after a month of rehearsals with the cast, an approach he described as almost theatrical and intended to capture "the sensation of the present".² The actors described exhausting night-to-dawn shooting days; Eduardo Noriega recalled leaving the studio while it was still dark, and Najwa Nimri said the film demanded enormous concentration.²

The film is a Spanish-Argentine co-production by Alquimia Cinema and Tornasol Films with Arena Films and the Italian company Cattleya, distributed by Zeta Audiovisual.³^•¹⁴ Alfredo F. Mayo was the cinematographer, Iván Aledo the editor, and Frédéric Bégin and Phil Electric composed the music.¹

Reception

The film opened in Spanish cinemas on 23 September 2005 and reached US theaters on 6 July 2007.²^•⁵ It screened at the Toronto and Vancouver festivals in 2005 and at San Francisco in 2006, and participated in the Mar del Plata Film Festival.¹^•³

Critics responded to the confined setup in different registers. Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Times gave it 4 out of 5, calling it a funny film that touches on corporate responsibility to society, the price of ambition, and the persistence of workplace sexism.⁶ Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, rating it 2.5 out of 4, wrote that the film does not trust an illuminating comedy of pathetic people to entertain for long and so adds romantic elements.⁶ In Spain, the ACEprensa review praised the ensemble cast and Piñeyro's controlled staging of the near-single setting, while finding the anti-globalization argument and a sexual sequence debatable.⁴ Ocaña in El País judged that explicitness and redundancy in some dialogue lowered the film's quality, and regretted the loss of the play's closing line, in which the company declares it wants not a good person who seems a bastard but a bastard who seems a good person.¹¹

At the Goya Awards for 2005, the film won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Carmelo Gómez.³^•¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2005–2009 films › Released 2005 to 2007

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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