A television director known for making violence hard to sit through, Óscar Pedraza arrives in features with a romance that has no edges at all. On the evidence of Drawn Together, he is better with a fist than with a kiss.
Fi1m perspective
The first look between Marfil and Sebastian in Drawn Together (2026) tells you the whole film, and Pedraza knows it. He shoots it cleanly, holds it a beat, and moves on to a story that arrives exactly where that look promised, 104 minutes later. It is the work of a man who has directed a great deal of television and knows how to get a scene done and move on. It is not the work of a man who wanted anything from the scene.
Pedraza has been directing episodes since 2007, and the jobs got bigger through the 2010s: Unauthorized Living (2018), then four episodes of Patria (2020), nine of Sky Rojo (2021), four of The Longest Night (2022). Patria made his name. What people praised in it and what they complained about are the same thing. He stages violence so that it is hard to watch, and he does not always trust the material to be brutal enough on its own, so he underlines it. Fernando Aramburu's novel did not need underlining. Still, it is a director's instinct rather than a foreman's, and we would rather a director had it than not.
Which makes Drawn Together odd. Ester Expósito is a rich man's daughter and Hugo Diego Garcia the bodyguard paid to keep her breathing, and the danger sits in the premise and stays there, mentioned rather than felt. David Acereto shoots it clean and handsome, and Pedraza's habit of doing things for real rather than in a computer gives the film a solidity most of its kind lack. But nothing in it confronts anybody, and confronting people was the one thing he was known for. We sat through the whole film waiting to believe it would cost either of them anything to touch, and we never did; they look at each other like two people who have already read the ending.
Álex de la Iglesia produced it, and there is a second Enfrentados film to come. Pedraza has also, between the two, made Zoomers (2025), a series about the young, which is at least a different room. If the sequel is going to be worth an evening, he will need to make the money and the enemies feel like something that could hurt. He knows how. He did it on television for years.
Biography
Óscar Pedraza is a director whose credits include episodes of the Spanish television series Patria (2020), Sky Rojo (2021), Unauthorized Living (2018) and The Longest Night (2022). He directed the 2026 feature film Drawn Together (also known as Enfrentados: Marfil), a romantic thriller produced by Pokeepsie Films and released on Amazon Prime Video.
Earlier in his career he worked as a second assistant director on projects including Crossing Borders (2006). He has also directed other series such as Viradeira (2017–2018) and Zoomers (2025).
