Set in Vallecas, the plot follows the vicissitudes of Ramón, a chubby teenager who is involved in a combo of tragedies, unwillingly slicing the jugular of his best friend with the edge of a cockle can, prompting the latter's girlfriend's death by fall from balcony, and ensuing death of another neighbor.

[1][2][3][4][5] García Ruiz's sophomore feature after Mensaka, The Other Side is based on the novel El otro barrio by Elvira Lindo.

[8] David Rooney of Variety considered that García Ruiz delivers "a dense, intimate drama that avoids all the cliches of the problem-teen genre and instead creates an affecting, acutely observed portrait of people in a specific but universally recognizable social milieu", otherwise deeming the psychological drama to be "too subtle" for wide commercial coverage.

[2] José María Caparrós Lera highlights the film's "extreme callousness and narrative classicism" as its hallmarks.

[1] Ángel Fernández-Santos of El País considered the film to be bold yet unbalanced, assessing that the script is not "well-constructed" nor "calculated", but quite the opposite, with the sketch of the lawyer suffering from inaccuracies that imperil the film's formal framework.