Spain, 1980 and in the wetlands of Andalucía two Madrid cops are called on to pay the isolated community a visit when two girls disappear as they were out one night. The trouble is, this is a very insular society who do not take to talking to strangers, even the police who are supposed to be doing them good, and when the cops, Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) and Pedro (Raúl Arevalo) arrive at the home of the two missing sisters, they might as well be hitting their heads against a brick wall for all the help the parents are. The father seems disgusted, convinced they have run away to the big city, and the mother is obviously cowed and unwilling to speak, though just as the officers are leaving she presses an envelope into their hands…
Come the twenty-first century the television series that became the in thing were the crime dramas, and the ones out of Scandinavia and the European continent generally were very well thought of, depicting various picturesque locations as hotbeds of murder and extortion that needed an intensive police investigation to clear the mystery up once and for all. The echoes of Twin Peaks were still being felt, evidently, only without so much of the weirdness, but the American True Detective attempted to marry up the thriller plot with the metaphysical consequences and was a major hit, in its first season at any rate. This film was a Spanish standalone yarn that nevertheless seemed to owe much to those efforts.
It could be seen as a Spanish True Detective dispensing with the whole shebang in a tidy hour and three quarters, except director Alberto Rodríguez had been planning it for a good ten years before he actually made it, and wanted to marry the conventions of a serial killer narrative to a commentary on the state of the nation as he saw it. That was to say, he thought Spain was suffering the same economic and political conditions that it had been at the point when General Franco’s death had supposedly signalled the end of fascism in the country, but according to this the presence of citizens who had been in authority and behaved very badly indeed remained a problem that was too big to be swept under the carpet.
Juan, you see, was a policeman under Franco and as Pedro meets a sleazy journalist to follow up a lead on a scrappy photographic negative, he is told Juan was a particularly nasty specimen, torturing his way through insurgents and freedom fighters with impunity, and that sticks in Pedro’s craw. That whole idea of setting aside your differences for a better tomorrow is fine in theory, but doesn’t take into account the past may be the elephant in the room, impossible to ignore especially for a man like Pedro who was resolutely anti-fascist, and has recently had a controversial letter published in a national newspaper to that effect. This tension between our heroes offered more depth, if a shade era and country specific, than you might otherwise have expected settling down to a police mystery movie.
As to that mystery, it perhaps suffered from telling a tale that was growing sadly overfamiliar, the corruption behind the apparently placid façade, with no place for nostalgia in the case of the terrible events picked at like scabs over old wounds. Here it was the innocent victims, the young girls who it turns out are being systematically disposed of, that were really the most sympathetic, the excuse that they had disappeared because they were desperate to leave this suffocating region and its oppressive people so had escaped to better places all too convincing until you realise that’s what those left behind tell themselves lest anyone admit there is a serious problem. More than serious, positively tragic as murder is rife, though for some stretches this could be a frustrating watch when it seemed the detectives were getting nowhere fast when everyone clammed up on questioning. The conclusion that wasn’t was a predictable way to close the plot, but compensations in the intense mood, rolling landscapes and an excellent night time car chase shot from inside the pursuing vehicle were enough to recommend it. Music by Julio de la Rosa.
