Along the Mediterranean coastline in Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts and beachfront properties, with their lavish bars, pools, and nightclubs. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. Crematorium opens with Matías’s death, who had rejected all of these changes, which sets off a chain reaction, uncovering a family’s past that had been buried for years, and leading those closest to him to question the paths they’ve chosen. In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Crematorium explores the cocaine glimmer and champagne fizz of luxurious parties and their accompanying underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, financial speculation, and the melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash, while capturing something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares, clear-eyed, into the abyss, and portrays us as who we really are.