AllMovie

Javier Balaguer's Sólo Mía opens with confusion and chaos, befitting the potboiler thriller it never quite becomes. This is to the filmmakers' credit. While the two leads (Paz Vega and Sergi López) are more beautiful than average, the film is, for most of its length, a brutally straightforward and well-played drama of quotidian domestic terror. Vega effectively conveys both Angela's fierce independence and her naïveté, while López portrays Joaquín with enough subtlety that we can recognize his humanity. This makes him more engaging and more disturbing than the monstrous cardboard villains in cheesy Hollywood thrillers on this subject matter, like Enough and Sleeping With the Enemy. Unfortunately, after introducing us to these believable characters and realistically delineating the frustrating complexity of Angela's situation, Balaguer reverts back to genre pyrotechnics for the film's well-staged, but implausible, climax, and its silly melodramatic postscript, neither of which would be out of place in the above-mentioned Hollywood flicks. Perhaps this is the filmmaker's way of engaging a Spanish audience presumed to be less receptive to a tale of patriarchal abuse.