Advantages of Travelling by Train

Helga returns home to find her husband in a state of complete madness, displaying extreme behavior that makes it impossible for her to care for him safely. Troubled and overwhelmed, she makes the difficult decision to have him admitted to a psychiatric clinic in the north of the country, setting the emotional tone for her subsequent train journey.

Ángel presents himself as a psychiatrist investigating a complex clinical case, but when Helga searches for him later, she discovers he is actually a man with a personality disorder, not a licensed psychiatrist. His true identity remains ambiguous, raising questions about the reliability of everything he tells Helga on the train.

Early in their conversation, Ángel admits his case is the worst he has ever encountered, hinting at personal involvement beyond professional interest.

The red file is a collection of stories that Ángel leaves on the train when he departs to fetch provisions. These stories detail the intricate tale of Martín Urales de Úbeda and other narratives Helga finds compelling enough to pursue for publication, becoming a central plot device that drives her later actions.

Martín's story is largely fabricated. He is not a former Kosovo fighter pilot as described, but rather a former garbage man from Murcia who lost an arm during a brutal night shift. His paranoid delusions led him to create an elaborate fantasy life, and the account given through his sister Amelia is actually Martín himself, blurring the lines between reality and invention.

The narrative hints early at inconsistencies in Martín's pilot background, with details that don't quite align.

Helga plans to kill Emilio with a hammer and feed his brain to dogs, but instead chooses to poison him. The poisoning backfires, instead of killing him, the drugs render Emilio nearly catatonic. Rather than letting him die, Helga has him admitted to a psychiatric clinic, essentially disposing of him the same way she did her husband.

Earlier scenes show Helga observing how her husband was committed, providing the template for Emilio's fate.

After reading the stories in the red file left by Ángel, Helga becomes enthralled by their content. Motivated by both the compelling nature of the narratives and possibly her own psychological state following her traumatic relationship with Emilio, she resolves to publish these stories and seeks out Ángel to make it happen.

When Ángel visits the Urales de Úbeda family home near Las Ventas, he discovers that Amelia is actually Martín, and the basement is filled with years of accumulated garbage. This reveals the depth of Martín's psychological deterioration, he has been hoarding garbage in his own home, paralleling his former work as a garbage collector and symbolizing his buried trauma and secrets.

Yes, Helga survives the explosion that occurs in the basement of the Las Ventas house. After the spontaneous combustion or fire, she is shown giving consent for a neurosurgical intervention, indicating she sustained injuries but lived through the incident.

After surviving the explosion and receiving medical treatment, Helga boards another train and encounters a man who bears a striking resemblance to Martín Urales de Úbeda. This ambiguous encounter leaves the nature of reality uncertain, was this a coincidence, is the man actually Martín, or is Helga's mind creating parallels? The film deliberately leaves this open to interpretation.

Ángel approaches Helga on the train and asks if she would like to hear about his life, framing it as a way to pass the time during the journey. He proceeds to unfold the complex case of Martín Urales de Úbeda, using the account from Martín's sister Amelia as the narrative backbone. His motivation remains ambiguous, whether he's seeking confession, testing his own storytelling, or manipulating Helga for unknown purposes.

After leaving a dissatisfying relationship with a bestselling author, Helga begins a romance with Emilio, a stand owner in Retiro. Their relationship initially seems loving, bonding over their shared affection for dogs, but gradually Emilio's control intensifies. He forces Helga to behave like a dog, psychologically abusing and dominating her until she reaches a breaking point where she plans to kill him.

Driven by her fascination with the stories in the red file, Helga travels to Galapagar to locate Ángel, hoping to secure the rights to publish his stories. It is there that she learns the truth about Ángel, he is not a psychiatrist as he claimed, but a man with a personality disorder, fundamentally shifting her understanding of the narrative she has been absorbing.