What Have I Done to Deserve This? 1984

Gloria, Carmen Maura, is a worn-down housewife whose life unfolds in a small, shabby Madrid apartment by the motorway. She keeps a fragile balance between running a crowded home, caring for her husband, Antonio Ángel de Andrés López, her mother-in-law, and two sons, all while working as a cleaning lady to keep the family afloat and relying on amphetamines to push through each day. The marriage is frayed and strained, money is tight, and every bill—television, telephone, heating, and groceries—feels like a weight pressing down on her. The world outside feels just as unkind as the one inside, and Gloria moves through her routine with a weary resolve that barely masks her desperation.

Long ago, in Germany, Antonio served as a driver for Ingrid Müller Katia Loritz, a German singer whose charm masked a brief, shadowy affair. The only tangible keepsakes he clings to are a signed photograph and a tape of her song Nur nicht Aus Liebe Weinen, which Gloria despises but cannot escape. The past bleeds into the present as Antonio’s memories become fuel for the present-day grind. In a web of secrets, Antonio’s involvement with Ingrid also included copying letters she claimed she had received from Hitler, a detail that haunts Gloria when it surfaces in conversations about money, legitimacy, and the value of what one can forge. The past is not buried; it is a quiet, dangerous undercurrent that continues to shape the family’s precarious footing.

The life of crime that lingers in Antonio’s past re-enters through a chance encounter with the writer Lucas Gonzalo Suárez in his taxi. Lucas proposes a high-stakes con: forging Hitler’s diaries for a lucrative payoff. The idea—at once thrilling and terrifying—casts a long shadow over Gloria’s already fragile world, where the line between necessity and crime becomes increasingly blurred. The notion of forgery expands beyond the diaries to a wider labyrinth of lies that Antonio had already touched years before, and now Gloria is pulled into a new kind of hand-to-mouth existence, driven by the fear of losing everything she has and the dangerous lure of quick money.

Meanwhile, a book of Ingrid Müller’s memoirs, written by a friend and containing letters from Hitler, stands as another tempting artifact of manipulation. Antonio’s role in forging documents and letters, all in the name of a potential windfall, becomes a blueprint for a family legacy he hopes to leave to his sons. He envisions teaching the craft of forgery to one of them as his sole inheritance, a plan that feels both misguided and inevitable in a world where desperation often makes criminals of the vulnerable.

Gloria’s world continues to crack under pressure as her older son, Toni [Juan Martínez], fourteen, quietly dreams of a rural life as a farmer and saves money by selling heroin. He clings to a fantasy of the land while moving in a parallel orbit of danger. The younger Miguel [Miguel Ángel Herranz], twelve, is navigating his own confusing territory, sleeping with older men, and testing the boundaries of a mother’s control. Gloria confronts Miguel after suspecting his secret, and his defiant reply—“I’m the master of my own body”—resonates through the apartment like a blown kiss of defiance against a world that has little mercy to offer.

Abuela, the grandmother, is a figure of stubborn resilience and a surprising dream to return to her native village. She drinks soft drinks with a childlike optimism, clinging to the idea that a simpler life awaits beyond the cramped walls of Madrid. Her presence adds a bittersweet texture to Gloria’s struggles, a reminder of roots and a future that may never come. Abuela is portrayed by Chus Lampreave, whose presence anchors the family’s history and the soft, stubborn stubbornness that threads through the household.

Gloria’s circle includes Cristal and Juani, two neighbors who inhabit the same crowded space with their own complex moral shades. Cristal Verónica Forqué is a compassionate soul with a rough edge, a prostitute with a heart of gold who nonetheless drifts through the same rooms Gloria inhabits. Juani Kiti Mánver is sharp, restless, and obsessively tidy, a woman who uses meticulous cleanliness as a shield and a weapon, often clashing with her own daughter Vanessa, a girl endowed with telekinetic powers and a spark of wild potential. The intricate web of friendships, rivalries, and unspoken loyalties in this building becomes a quiet, stubborn chorus to Gloria’s own tragedy and resilience.

The apartment’s tense, claustrophobic atmosphere is amplified by a cast of ordinary people who live on the edge of survival. Among them is a pharmacist who refuses to dispense sedatives without a prescription, a moment that underscores the friction between need and safety in a world where every pill is a decision with consequences. Pilar Ortega Pilar Ortega steps into this scene as a symbol of the everyday barriers that push Gloria toward riskier options, while the neighborhood dentist Javier Gurruchaga becomes a troubling figure in Miguel’s life, a man who stands as both caretaker and danger in a complex calculus of fear and necessity.

As the pressure mounts, Gloria’s life spirals toward a climactic moment in which Antonio’s past and the family’s fragile present collide. A violent act—Antonio striking Gloria, and Gloria retaliating with a leg of ham that ends his life—shatters the fragile equilibrium they have managed to clutch to. The ensuing police investigation fails to pinpoint Gloria as the culprit, leaving her to reckon with a future that looks increasingly empty. Toni and Abuela eventually leave Madrid for the village, and Gloria, momentarily abandoned, contemplates ending her life. It is Miguel, returning unexpectedly, who gives her a reason to keep going, a fragile spark of hope that perhaps the family’s future can still be reimagined.

In the end, the story lingers in the spaces between survival and complicity, between the weight of history and the stubborn will to endure. It is a portrait of a woman who refuses to surrender completely, even as her world collapses around her, and of a family that clings to each other in the face of a society that offers few easy answers. The film stays intimate, human, and unsentimental in its examination of desperation, loyalty, and the small acts of courage that keep people from breaking under the pressure of circumstance.