The year is 1999, and Argentinian justice officer Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) has recently retired and is contemplating how to spend his final years, settling upon becoming an author as after all, he has plenty of real life cases to draw from. However, there is one in particular he dwells upon, and that was the brutal rape and murder of a young woman twenty-five years ago, a crime that was never cleared up to his satisfaction, so it is this he bases his book around, although he is finding that writing is something easier said than done. He decides to visit his old boss, Irene Menendez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil) to get things straight in his mind...
The ghosts of the past are what concern this Oscar-winning thriller which also operated as a drama, and in some ways a romantic drama at that. Juan José Campanella was the man bringing the story to the screen, and receiving more acclaim than he ever had before as not only was this a huge hit in his native Argentina, it did very well around the world, becoming the highest profile film to emerge from his country in living memory. Was the hype justified? For the first half hour at least, you may be wondering as this looks to be your basic police procedural with the gimmick of seeing the main players two-and-a-half decades after the fact.
Yet Campanella was drawing you in, and what came across as the kind of plot that would exist just as well on series television grew deeper and more emotional the longer it went on, closer to the form of classic cinema of yesteryear. The point is that while these characters thought they could move on with their lives even at this distance, the events that have so influenced them are not done with them, and inform their actions in the present. Esposito is good at his job, and when this murder case comes to him he is initially reluctant to take it, preferring something a lot less sensational. However, as he is practically forced to investigate, he comes to regret ever hearing of the dead woman, mainly because of the shockwaves her death result in.
There was one scene that had everyone talking, and that was the football stadium sequence where Esposito and his partner Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francello) track the man they believe to be the killer to a match, reasoning that it may be a year since Gomez (Javier Godino) effectively disappeared but he cannot deny his passion for the big game. This starts with a helicopter shot of the stadium that continues in one unbroken shot to zoom in on the two officers, follows them as they catch sight of Gomez, and the ensuing chase, a superb example of how the cinema can lift what could have been run of the mill and, yes, it might be showing off, but it's an audacious way to electrify the audience.
In the second half the spectre of Argentina's fascist past looms as the shadowy powers that be intervene on the investigation, and Esposito is forced into a position he would rather not have been involved with, all because of his conscience and sense of justice to do the right thing by the dead woman and her grieving husband who begins to parallel his own feelings as he cannot forget the wife he loved but has been separated from her forever. A similar thing happens to Esposito when he is parted from Irene through circumstance, as she will be safe due to her social standing, but he has to go on the run, thereby thwarting the love affair they almost but did not have. For a thriller that goes to dark places, The Secret in their Eyes turns unexpectedly poignant in its last act, even with a twist arguing against the death penalty that could have been silly in other, less skilled hands. Really it was the invocation of the power of memory that most watching this could respond to, and the optimism that the story edges toward. Music by Federico Jusid and Emilio Kauderer.
