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The 2008 global crisis has produced a large corpus of Spanish films dealing with the social cost of such a financial and institutional meltdown. From social dramas to action thrillers, the causes and the aftermath of that crisis have been not only depicted or explored but also affectively mediated through fiction films in Spanish cinema through a variety of styles and genres. Taking four of those productions as case studies, this article focuses on the ethics and aesthetics involved in using both cinematic realism and genre filmmaking in crisis representation. Hermosa juventud/Beautiful Youth (Rosales 2014) and Juan Techo y Comida/Food and Shelter (del Castillo 2015) portray the precarious lives of working-class protagonists through a restrained visual language grounded in social observation. By contrast, Murieron por encima de sus posibilidades/Dying Beyond Their Means (Lacuesta 2014) and El desconocido/Retribution (de al Torre 2015) adopt the tropes of commercial cinema, mobilizing stylization and global genre codes to dramatize the effects of economic collapse. This article ultimately investigates the type of cinematic visuality that the crisis, in more than one sense, generates in and through the film medium.