Swap judges for an algorithm? That’s the spark behind Artificial Justice, a Spanish-Portuguese thriller that imagines a near-future Spain voting on whether an AI should replace human judges. It’s a bold pitch with real-world echoes, dressed in cool, clinical style and anchored by a tight-lipped lead turn from Verónica Echegui. The ideas land. The urgency, less so.
The setup: AI on the bench
The story takes place in 2028. Spain’s government touts a justice overhaul built around a system called THENTE—software designed first to assist judges, then to quietly overtake them. The promise is speed and neutrality. Fewer backlogs, fewer political fights, fewer human errors. To sell the change, the government calls a national referendum.
Judge Carmen Costa (Echegui), respected and famously cautious, is invited to assess the system before it goes live. She’s not a zealot or a Luddite. She’s the kind of judge who reads the footnotes and asks who trained the model, who owns the data, and who profits. That’s where things start to wobble.
First, the software’s lead engineer dies in an accident that doesn’t add up. Then the company’s new CEO disappears. Soon after, Alicia Kóvack—the creator of THENTE—vanishes, too. What starts as a technical audit turns into a quiet chase through ministries, boardrooms, and cold corridors, as Costa follows a thread that ties business interests to political ambitions and, maybe, to a plan to steer a whole country through its courts.
Director Simón Casal, writing with Víctor Sierra, frames this not as flashy sci-fi but as a subdued political noir. The film was shot in Galicia, and the locations do a lot of work: glass offices, gray skies, empty plazas, all pushing a sterile mood that mirrors the system on trial. Echegui’s performance rides on small gestures—tight shoulders, clipped answers, pauses that suggest she’s thinking two moves ahead while choosing not to show her cards.
The film’s themes are not hypothetical. Courts around the world are drowning in cases, and governments are searching for fixes. In recent years, risk assessment tools have fed into bail and sentencing decisions in the United States. Estonia has flirted with algorithmic help for small claims. In Europe, lawmakers have placed justice-related AI in the highest-risk category, calling for transparency and human oversight. Artificial Justice folds that debate into a scenario Spain could plausibly face: a public vote that swaps the messiness of human judgment for the clean promises of code.
THENTE is treated like a black box with a friendly logo. It’s marketed as impartial, but the film keeps asking: impartial to whom? Neutrality is easy to claim and hard to prove when the data reflects past bias, and when a private vendor sits between the citizen and the state. Costa’s review turns into an ethics exam. Who audits the auditors? Who appeals a decision when the reasoning is proprietary? And when things go wrong, who takes the blame—the judge who clicked confirm, or the company that wrote the model?
This is the film at its sharpest: when it pits due process against efficiency, and public interest against corporate leverage. The referendum backdrop brings media noise, political pressure, and those slick explainer videos that make complex systems look safe and inevitable. Casal builds a believable ecosystem of briefings, televised debates, and ministerial talking points.
Sharp debate, slow pulse
Here’s the snag: for a thriller, the pulse is faint. Casal leans on long, quiet takes—often on Costa’s face—while the plot piles up urgent threats. The tension never quite catches up with the stakes. At 94 minutes, the film should move. Instead, it often feels longer, not because the story is complex, but because the pacing doesn’t match the danger it keeps suggesting.
That mismatch blunts the paranoia. Scenes that should sprint—door handles tested in the night, a car that lingers one block back, a file copied under a deadline—walk instead. The camera’s patience can be powerful, but too often it lands as stall, not dread. When a comparison pops up with nervier techno-thrillers—think The Net’s streamlined peril or The Ghost Writer’s gathering storm—you feel the gap. Those films keep pressure on the protagonist while feeding the audience new information. Artificial Justice holds its cards a beat too long, then reveals them without a squeeze.
The cast is not the problem. Echegui keeps Costa grounded and human. You’re always aware of a mind at work, even when the script gives her little to say. Tamar Novas, Alba Galocha, and Alberto Ammann round out a stacked ensemble, circling Costa as allies, skeptics, and gatekeepers. The performances stay natural, and the tone avoids melodrama.
The production design also helps. Offices are clean to the point of sterile. Phones are always present but rarely helpful. Hallways look like they were built to keep citizens at a distance. The aesthetic matches the themes: everything is streamlined, but nothing feels welcoming. You sense a system built for speed, not care.
Where the film stumbles is follow-through. It floats juicy ideas—algorithmic bias, procurement politics, corporate capture—then skims them. A few scenes hint at the training data behind THENTE and the incentives that shape it. Then we move on. The subtext is rich, but the script doesn’t dig in. The result is a debate framed in striking images, rather than a mystery that deepens as we go.
Some of the most intriguing material sits at the edges. The referendum adds a media circus that the movie mostly keeps offscreen. The company behind THENTE acts like any big vendor selling mission-critical software to government: big promises, tight NDAs, and a compliance team that says a lot without saying anything. The politicians are more cynical than cartoonish, which is refreshing, but the backchannels feel underexplored. You want one scene where a policy aide says the quiet part loud, or a procurement officer spells out the cost of pulling the plug after millions have been spent.
Still, the film earns points for refusing the simple villain angle. No mustache-twirling tycoon, no hacker prophet. The danger is structural: a system that lets power hide behind code and process. That’s a smarter, scarier take, and it fits the moment. People don’t lose trust in justice overnight; they lose it when decisions arrive fast, in bulk, and with no one to talk to.
As a portrait of that fear, Artificial Justice is effective. As a thriller about a judge risking her career to stop a slow-motion takeover, it’s uneven. The stakes are high, but the rhythm is flat. The movie rarely lets urgency change how characters move, talk, or breathe. Even when Costa’s own safety is on the line, the film’s temperature barely shifts.
If you go in for mood, you’ll find plenty. Galicia’s light does most of the heavy lifting—diffused skies, reflective surfaces, rooms that look like they were designed by a committee. The camera prefers distance to coverage. You watch Costa cross spaces that seem to swallow her, which doubles as a visual argument about bureaucracy. It’s smart, often beautiful, and occasionally numbing.
What about the tech itself? The film wisely avoids junk jargon. THENTE is a product, owned by a company, licensed to a government. People pitch it, buy it, defend it, and pressure others to accept it. In that sense, the movie feels grounded. It’s not about a sentient machine; it’s about governance—procurement, oversight, appeals, and the soft power that follows once an institution says, “The system decided.”
One useful frame: think of the film as a referendum drama with thriller flourishes. Its best scenes revolve around process—who gets a meeting, who gets a memo, who signs off—rather than chases or fights. If you want propulsive suspense, you may get restless. If you want an anxiety portrait of how easily a complex democracy can outsource gray areas to a black box, you’ll find plenty to chew on.
For viewers weighing a ticket, here’s the quick take:
- What works: a timely premise, icy visuals, Echegui’s controlled performance, and a credible world of lobbyists, ministers, and consultants.
- What doesn’t: the pace, which stays slow even as threats mount; a plot that hints at deep rot but doesn’t drill down; and suspense beats that feel muted when they should sting.
There’s a version of this movie that leans harder into the mechanics of the referendum—public hearings, expert testimonies, whistleblowers, the press getting fed and misled—and lets the thriller evolve out of that noise. Casal’s version keeps things hushed. It’s an aesthetic choice that suits the coolness of the topic, but it asks the audience to supply tension the movie doesn’t always build on its own.
Even so, Artificial Justice arrives at a moment when audiences are primed for this exact conversation. Courts are under strain. Politicians want speed and certainty. Tech firms promise both. People want fairness they can understand. This film puts that clash on a big screen and asks a simple, unsettling question: if an AI makes the call, who do we hold to account when it’s wrong?
That question lingers longer than the plot. It may be why the movie will stick with some viewers despite its stumbles. The ideas are sturdy. The craft is polished. The story, though, keeps jogging when it needs to sprint.
