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Director Alejandro Amenábar spoke very briefly before the screening of his latest film While at War and the main sentiment was this: “It could happen anywhere.” He doesn’t, however, just mean rebellion or uprising. He doesn’t mean coup or military dictatorship either. What he and co-writer Alejandro Hernández share via the parallel journeys of Don Miguel de Unamuno (Karra Elejalde) and General Franco (Santi Prego) is that just fights always run the risk of becoming unjust very fast. This truth is ultimately a product of our collective naïveté when it comes to thinking our nation won’t succumb to tyranny—that a show of force isn’t always about suppression. We will delude ourselves to the point of no return and have nobody else to blame. “Anywhere” is quite literally your backyard.

The similarity of what Amenábar puts on-screen to the current state of American politics is legitimately horrifying.

Alejandro Amenábar went 15 years without making a feature in Spain, and his first such since the excellent “The Sea Inside” is notable not only for being a 20th-century Spanish history lesson, but also for providing a particularly timely anti-fascist message.

Climaxing in a famous speech of protest from literary lion Miguel de Unamuno, this is a worthy enterprise that errs on the side of caution, carrying the slightly stale whiff of awards-bait cinema in which greatness is frequently signaled but inspiration somehow lacking. Though surely due a certain amount of international travel, it’s unlikely to stir the kind of critical or viewer excitement needed to make this political back-chapter enticing to audiences outside Spanish-speaking territories.

To an extent, Amenábar and co-writer Alejandro Hernandez are hemmed in by the perspective of their protagonist (played by Karra Elejalde), an esteemed author and philosopher then considered by some “Spain’s greatest writer...