Cinema is littered with aspirants to the empty throne of suspense movie director Alfred Hitchcock, but most of their attempts fail because they don’t know the difference between shock and suspense, and they don’t do the work required to make us care about their characters.

Hitchcock once remarked that shock is showing an audience a stadium full of people, then blowing it up with a bomb, whereas suspense is showing us the bomb under the bleacher seats, then focusing on two men sitting above it, having a conversation, as the audience anxiously waits to find out whether they’ll discover the bomb before it blows up.

“Everybody Knows” opens with an anonymous hand clipping several articles from newspapers about a kidnapped child, thereby planting the bomb, before Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi treats us to the languorously extended reunion of a large, far-flung Spanish family that’s coming together for a wedding back home.

Although this is Farhadi’s first film in Spanish, he captures the boisterous, close-knit and occasionally hectoring rhythms of a Latin family, enough to remind me of my reunions with the Costa Rican branch of my own family.

It helps that he borrows Pedro Almodovar’s longtime cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcaine, to convey the richly textured beauty of Madrid’s architecture and landscape, as everyone returns to the old family homestead, including Laura (Penelope Cruz), one of the sisters of the bride, and Paco (Javier Bardem), an old family friend who owns a successful local vineyard.

Laura is already married, but her Argentinian husband is unable to attend the wedding, so she makes the plane trip to Spain with her two children anyway, which leads her teenage daughter Irene (Carla Campra) and Paco’s nephew Felipe (Sergio Castellanos) to catch each other’s eyes.

The old church that appears in the film’s opening, along with the newspaper clippings, is revealed to be the site of the wedding, its decrepit bell tower infested with pigeons and etched with the initials of lovers from decades ago.

When Irene and Felipe sneak up into the bell tower during the nuptials, we feel the weight of history in the surroundings, as Felipe reveals to Irene that her mother, Laura, had once loved Paco.

There’s an entire movie that could have been made, about whether the reckless, lively Irene will wind up repeating their families’ history with the more cautious Felipe, as the wedding ceremony gives way to revelry that lasts well into the night.

But like Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” this is where the swerve into tragedy comes in, as “Everybody Knows” suddenly becomes a very different film, when Irene goes missing from the party, Laura finds the newspaper clippings about the previous kidnapping on Irene’s bed, and the bomb planted at the start of the film finally goes off.

This becomes a difficult film to review from this point forward, due to the plot twists that ensue, but what’s revealed is that this outwardly affectionate family had more than one bomb planted under their seats, in terms of false pretenses, financial worries and long-simmering resentments, and Irene’s disappearance has lit the fuse on all of them.

It speaks to Farhadi’s strengths as a storyteller that he manages to treat each of the family members sympathetically, even as he sets them at each other’s throats, although it helps that he’s able to draw from Cruz and Bardem’s real-life chemistry, given that the couple has been married since 2010.

The tragedy is that, whether or not Irene returns, no one will survive unscathed.

And with that, I can’t say more. You simply need to see the rest for yourselves.