‘Intacto’ opens on a lunar-style landscape, grey, except for a casino sitting in the centre. “Place your bets,” a voiceover says as the scene shifts to a roulette wheel.

Federico (Eusebio Poncela) is a man who can steal luck. He works for Samuel Berg, the owner of the casino, a tall white-suited man played by Max Von Sydow. Federico wants to leave. He is meant to inherit the casino, but as he says, “I don’t want anything I don’t win.” He leaves, but not before Berg takes away his gift, in one of the film’s more subtly menacing scenes.

The plot shifts to Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a young thief who has miraculously survived a plane crash. Entitled to a large insurance pay out, he’s also wanted by the police who put a guard on his room at the hospital. Federico turns up to see Tomas, posing as someone from the insurance company. He is convinced Tomas survived the crash by unwittingly stealing the luck of the other passengers. Later that night he helps Tomas escape. From this point on, the two men engage in a series of increasingly bizarre and dangerous games, including running through a forest blindfolded. They are betting Tomas’s luck and other people’s lives. But there is a purpose to these games. The winner travels to Ucanca, where he plays against the world’s luckiest man, the ‘King of Fate’ - Samuel Berg.

On their trail is Sara (Monica Lopez), a detective who has had the luck to survive a car crash that killed both her husband and daughter. Using one of Tomas’s fellow game players, Alejandro, a bullfighter, she tracks Tomas, entering the game herself.

Speaking of the gift to steal luck, Federico tells Tomas, “If you don’t have it, you’re nobody.” The cruelty and inhumanity of the game becomes evident in the way ordinary people are gambled as ‘captives.’ They are touched, their luck stolen, their photograph taken which the winner gets to keep. Berg has a filing cabinet full of these photographs. Although the captives usually volunteer themselves in exchange for money, they are poor people, sick, possibly homeless in some cases. They are society’s ‘nobodies.’ Not like the bullfighter or the lucky thief who survived a plane crash ‘intact.’ Having their luck stolen could mean death for the captives: from accident or illness.

Tomas’s former girlfriend, Ana, was meant to accompany him on his fateful plane journey, but at the last moment she didn’t go. Thus she survived the crash. What Tomas doesn’t know is that Federico has bet on one game using Ana’s photograph, rendering Ana a captive. Tomas loses. The winner takes Ana’s photograph along with the others he has won, before departing for Ucanca, to play Samuel Berg in the ultimate game, Russian roulette. The outcome will influence Ana’s fate since her luck has been stolen, leaving her vulnerable.

Later, Sara finds out why Ana did not get on the plane. At the last moment, Tomas had told her, “I don’t love you anymore.” For Sara this represents a kind of revelation. Fate determined by a few simple words, that speak of the absence of love rather than love itself.

Determined to win Ana’s picture back, Tomas travels to Ucanca, where Berg agrees to play him because “Nobody ever came here out of love before.” For the first time, Berg tells the story of how he came to be so lucky. He has survived something bigger and more terrible than all the others.

As the film moves towards its climax, the game is suddenly complicated by the arrival of a third player.

Throughout ‘Intacto,’ the roulette wheel, the shuffling of cards, shots of the stars, a throw of the dice, even insurance payouts, all act as symbols of chance and gambling. Von Sydow’s casting is masterly, for this is the man who once played chess with Death in ‘The Seventh Seal.’

The film’s colour palette focuses particularly on red and black. The red corridors of the casino, the red hallway of one of the game locations, the red of Ana’s blouse in the photograph, the red jacket and hat of Sara’s daughter in another picture. When Sara herself picks a captive in a game, she chooses a man with an orange jumper - it looks red. Red is particularly associated with those in danger, the captives, those who lose their lives in accidents. Meanwhile, the gamblers, Tomas, Federico and Sara, all constantly appear in black, or dark colours. Behind one of a series of black doors in the basement of the casino in Ucanca, the ultimate game with Berg takes place.

Red and black are the colours of the roulette wheel that opens the film.

Only Berg and the players who go up against him dress in white. Berg himself does not take captives, he simply wins them from others. The real question is why he does it. The implication is that on some level, he wants to meet someone luckier than himself, something that’s perhaps rooted in survivor’s guilt.

‘Intacto’ has been criticised for being too cold. And yet it’s not that the characters don’t love. Sara loves her dead partner and child. In spite of what he says to the contrary, Tomas does seem to love Ana. Berg too has a fatherly love for Federico, which is returned. But they are all engaged in a game, gambling everything. Their luck isolates them, makes them dangerous to others: none of them have partners or family. In that respect their luck is questionable. Especially since it leads to a deadly finale in which only one person can be the winner.

Rating: 8/10: Cool, cerebral, intriguing, completely original