Elite

The Currency of Privilege

There is a particular kind of weariness that hits when you start another teen drama. Before the first track drops, you can already see the hallway strut, the immaculate uniforms, the exclusive school, the outsider walking into a nest of rich kids and trouble. So when Carlos Montero and Darío Madrona brought *Elite* to Netflix in 2018, I didn't exactly expect revelation. On paper it sounded like algorithm fiction: three working-class students land scholarships at Spain's most elite prep school, Las Encinas, and somewhere along the line somebody winds up dead.

The annoying thing is that formulas work when the people running them know what they're doing.



Montero and Madrona are not interested in reinventing teen melodrama. They want to sharpen it, polish it, and make it cut deeper. *Elite* runs on a ruthless kind of elegance, jumping between police interrogations in the present and the slick, feverish months leading up to murder. The camera treats the characters like specimens under glass. Look at how Las Encinas is framed: hard lines, giant panes of glass, cold daylight, nowhere to hide. Guzmán, Lucrecia, and Carla move through it with the loose confidence of people who have never once doubted they belong. The scholarship kids enter those same rooms like something has gone wrong with the geometry. Their bodies stiffen. They seem to bounce off the invisible walls of old money.

The party scenes are where the show really digs its nails in. Early on, the visual language flips completely. The sober daylight blues and greys give way to soaked reds and purples. Bodies blur together in slow motion, bass rattling through the frame. The camera snakes through the room and keeps finding tiny signs of panic: a grip tightening around a glass, a glance held half a second too long, a face trying not to crack. It's textbook tension-building. We already know death is coming. What we are waiting for isn't the surprise but the exact moment wealth and cruelty finally turn fatal.



If *Elite* were only a beautiful murder puzzle, it would never have lasted 64 episodes across eight seasons. What keeps it grounded, especially early on, are performances that put real weight underneath all the gloss. Omar Ayuso is the clearest example. As Omar Shanaa—a closeted Muslim teen selling drugs so he can eventually get out—Ayuso brings a bruised seriousness that cuts straight through the soapiness. He was basically an unknown film student before this part made him internationally famous and, later, publicly intertwined with a bout of depression that briefly pulled him away from acting.

You can read that rawness in how he moves. Ayuso acts from the shoulders down. At home and in his family's grocery store, he hunches into himself; those heavy brows and rounded shoulders make him look pinned in place by expectation. He has the alert stillness of an animal waiting to be cornered. Then put him beside Ander (Arón Piper), and everything changes. His hands loosen. His neck relaxes. Even his breathing seems to make more room for him. The relief is so visible it feels almost too intimate to watch. He builds the performance out of that split between the person Omar is required to be and the person he might actually become.

IGN's David Griffin probably put it best when he said the show "loves to explore moral ambiguity while outside forces, like drug dealers and controlling parents, start to prey on the troubled teens." I think it also understands something simpler and nastier: teenagers, once cornered, are capable of frightening levels of selfishness.



I also don't think the show knows when to leave the party. By the later seasons, the procession of murders, cover-ups, and devastatingly attractive new arrivals stretches plausibility until it squeals. At some point you start wondering whether the Spanish government should just close Las Encinas for public safety.

Still, those first seasons have real bite. *Elite* never pretends its rich kids are pure evil or its working-class characters are saints. It throws everybody into the same glass box, rattles it hard, and watches who starts clawing first. The show gets one thing exactly right: privilege is not just an abstract condition. In this world, it behaves like a weapon. And at Las Encinas, everyone ends up cut by it.