Tag: netflix

Maria

  By

★★★½
“Jean Wick.”

Proof that a lack of originality is not necessarily a bar to being an entertaining movie, this pulls together elements from all over the place, but probably most notably, The Long Kiss Goodnight and John Wick. You have the “former assassin now leading an idyllic family life, until her past catches up with her” of the former. And the “Oh, they’re surely not going to kill tha… Hoo-boy. The hero/ine is going to be VERY angry with them” of the latter, among other elements.

In this case, we have Maria (Reyes), formerly Black Rose assassin Lily, who is now married with a young daughter, until a chance encounter with ex-colleage Kaleb (Padilla). He is still highly miffed at her betrayal, and sets his minions on her – and, worse still, her family. Maria takes the fight to Kaleb with the assistance of her mentor, Greg (Lazaro, probably the best performance in the film); he helped her escape by faking her death, yet still has ties to her old employers. Meanwhile, the chaos resulting from their actions do not impress Kaleb’s boss, Ricardo de la Vega (Webb, looking like the Filipino version of Alan Ford, Bricktop in Snatch), who turns to Kaleb’s brother, the even more vicious – and, worse, considerably more competent – Victor.

Like John Wick, the generally straightforward nature of this works in its favour. There’s not much standing between Maria and kicking ass, with frequent bursts of solid action. Sonny Sison also choreographed the other recent Filipino action heroine film on Netflix, BuyBust, and it has a similarly gritty feel. The hotel run by Greg also is more than a little reminiscent of a similar establishment for assassins from John Wick 2. Though there’s an odd bit where Kaleb’s right-hand woman goes there, looking for Maria, beats up a few people and… just leaves? We’ll let them off with a warning, since they do later have a rather nice brawl, wearing high-heels, in a night-club bathroom.

Reyes is an actress who learned fighting, rather than the other way round. Yet, she looks the part, and Lopez throws in some stylistic flourishes, such as shooting from overhead, which keep things interesting. Overall, this teeters on the edge of achieving our seal of approval, but a couple of things leave it fractionally short. The first is the unconscionable failure of Kaleb, Victor or Ricardo de La Vega at any point to say, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” I mean, the line positively writes itself. The other issue is an ending, which is way too open, pointing directly towards Maria 2 in a way I haven’t seen since the end of Kill Bill: Volume One. And that was, of course, originally intended as a single entity. There is a slight degree of closure, yet is largely unsatisfying: more like finishing a level of a game than defeating the final boss. If there ends up never being a sequel, I’m going to be annoyed…

Dir: Pedring Lopez
Star: Cristine Reyes, Ivan Padilla, Freddie Webb, Ronnie Lazaro

Tidelands

  By

★★★
“Attack of the killer cartel mermaids.”

Cal McTeer (Best) has just got out of prison after serving a 12-year sentence for arson leading to murder, a crime she committed as a teenager. Returning to her home town of Orphelin Bay, she finds her brother, Augie (Jakubenko), now working as a conduit for drugs, with the connivance of at least some local cops, and supplied by the mysterious Adrielle Cuthbert (Pataky). She oversees a commune near town called L’Attente with a zero-tolerance policy for dissent, and uses the proceeds of her narco-aquatics to fund a worldwide search for mysterious fragments of pottery. Turns out she is queen of the Tidelanders: the offspring of humanity and legendary sirens who inhabit the ocean. Though Cal doesn’t know it initially, a near-death experience shows that she is of similar stock. Adrielle doesn’t like the competition. And neither does local gangster Gregori Stolin (Koman), who is intent on muscling in on Augie’s business, and cutting out the middleman, to work directly with Adrielle.

It’s part Banshee, part True Blood, and part its own strange creation. It could well have been just a crime drama with familial overtones, an antipodean take on Sons of Anarchy: Cal’s father was lost at sea, and her mother spent what should have been the resulting inheritance on buying the local bar. Yet the makers opted to add fantastical creatures into it, though the sirens themselves are only ever glimpsed in cameo, at least for the first series. It is refreshingly gynocentric: Cal vs. Adrielle is the dynamic at the core, and considerably more interesting than Augie vs. Gregori, with neither woman prepared to give an inch of ground.  There’s no doubt who’s in charge, Adrielle dealing ruthlessly with any challenges to her authority, helped by the seer she keeps chained up in the basement.

It doesn’t end in any meaningful way, and I presume this first Netflix original series to come from Australia will be returning to expand further on the mythology set up in its debut run. For example, I was intrigued by the brief depiction of an apparent anti-siren secret society, run by local women who lost their men (one way or another) to the creatures, and maybe this will be developed further next season.  There’s something of a soap-opera feel to it as well, in that almost everyone is uniformly attractive, and seem to be having copious amount of sex – whether for pleasure or power. The sunny seaside setting also lends itself to plenty of cheesecake for both sexes, whether it’s shirtless beach bods, or Adrielle’s apparent aversion to bras.

Best makes for a solid heroine though, who takes no shit from anyone and, as is clearly demonstrated from her opening scene, is more than capable of taking care of herself – in or out of the water. She and the better-known Pataky are always worth watching in their scenes. While I’m not quite as convinced by anyone else, there was still enough to get us through these eight episodes, and leave us hungry for some more fish tales.

Creators: Stephen M. Irwin and Leigh McGrath
Star: Charlotte Best, Elsa Pataky, Aaron Jakubenko, Jacek Koman

Naam Shabana

  By

★★★½
“Four for the price of one?”

If you took four different films, by four different directors, and edited them together into a single entity, you might end up something similar to this. Oh, make no mistake: I still enjoyed most of this. It just doesn’t feel like a coherent whole, perhaps because it is a spin-off involving some of the same characters from an earlier film, Baby. For at least three-quarters of it, however, not having seen its predecessor shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

The first chunk is perhaps the weakest, introducing us to the heroine, Shabana Khan (Pannu), a college student and judo expert, with something of a quick temper. She has just started going out with a new boyfriend, when they get into an altercation with some cat-calling men, which ends with him dead in the street. It’s all rather unconvincing, not least the early incident which does a very poor attempt to establish Shabana’s zero tolerance for harassment.

Things do improve significantly thereafter, for it turns out she was under observation by a shadowy arm of the Indian government as a possible agent. She’s contacted by Ranvir Singh (Bajpayee), who offers to help her take revenge on her boyfriend’s killers, if she comes to work for him. With the authorities apparently uninterested in the case, Shabana accepts, and the next section covers her vengeance, and subsequent training under Singh. This is likely when the film is at its best, taking an interesting concept and executing it with some energy and flair.

Shabana then vanishes from her own movie in the third quarter, as we return to the topic of international arms dealer Mikhail (Sukumaran) he was briefly glimpsed at the beginning, making short work of two Indian agents in Vienna. Authorities have tracked down his ally, Tony, and apply pressure, hoping to discover Mikhail’s location. However, it turns out Mikhail has been using the services of a doctor to change his appearance, making the task of locating him that harder, and it becomes a race against time before he changes again, and the trail is lost.

Which brings us to another switch in direction for the final section, in which Shabana is sent into the hospital where Mikhail is about to get plastic surgery, in order to assassinate him. Here, she’s teamed up with Ajay Singh (Kumar), who was apparently the hero of Baby. There was a point where it looked like he was going to take over – not that we’d have minded too much, as we’ve always enjoyed seeing Kumar in action (despite his creepy mustache here), but this is supposed to be an action heroine film. Fortunately, that’s where it ends up.

Despite feeling a bit like Nikita, a bit like Peppermint, a bit like Alias and a bit like a Jason Bourne movie, there’s plenty going on, and the running time feels considerably shorter than its 147 minutes. It helps that its heroine is made to look relatively plain, rather than the typically stunning Bollywood actress. 

Dir: Shivam Nair
Star: Taapsee Pannu, Akshay Kumar, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Manoj Bajpayee

Close

  By

★★½
“…but no cigar”

Rapace appears to be aiming for a niche in the straight-to-video (or, at least, straight to Netflix) action market, this coming on the heels of Unlocked and What Happened to Monday. The results thus far have been rather uneven, and this seems unlikely to move the needle of his career much further forward. Not that the issues here are her fault; more that “being good in underwhelming movies” is not a passport to success. She plays Troubled Bodyguard (TM) Sam, who is hired to act as protection for Zoe (Nélisse), who just inherited a phosphate mining company, after the death of her father. Zoe got a bit too friendly with her last bodyguard, if you know what I mean, so Zoe’s stepmum (Varma) wants a woman this time.

Naturally, there’s a kidnap attempt. which sends Sam and Zoe on the run through Morocco. Is Mom, who was cut out of her husband’s will in favour of the daughter, responsible? Or is it the rival Chinese company, with whom there’s a battle over Zambian phosphate rights? The answer is: who cares? The film certainly doesn’t seem to, dropping elements like Sam’s estranged daughter in, then never doing much with them. See also the shotguns built into the walls of the family mansion. A better movie would have milked this great idea for all it was worth, but here, it’s thrown away in one blast. Instead, we get the inevitable blossoming of the relationship between the two women, who gradually come to understand each other, blah blah blah.

The action is intermittent, and probably not enough – a shooting schedule of barely four weeks likely played into that, chat being easier to film than fighting. There is a cool sequence where Sam battles someone with her hands literally tied behind her back, and a nice opening which establishes her bad-ass credentials, defending journalists from insurgent attack. Otherwise, Atomic Blonde this is not: an underwater combat scene (complete with CGI fish) being more risible than memorable. Rapace holds up her end of the dramatic requirements well enough; Nélisse, unfortunately, less so. Immediately she demands Sam go feed her Pomeranian, her character is tagged with the “rich bitch” label, and never escapes that ghetto.

This might have worked better as a limited series – although that territory was recently mined by Bodyguard, for which Richard Madden won a well-deserved Golden Globe. It would have given scope to dig further into Sam’s character, something definitely needed here. Her character was, apparently, inspired by real-life female bodyguard Jacquie Davis, who has been working in the field since the beginning of the eighties, and was the first such in the United Kingdom. There are a million possible stories to be told there, for example, her mission to Pakistan to rescue a pregnant woman kidnapped by her husband. She says, “We had to storm the villa by paying a taxi driver to ram the gates,” and then escaped the country over the mountains with the army in pursuit, because then-President, Benazir Bhutto, had recognized the bodyguard. Compared to that, what we get as a story here falls well short of a thrilling tale.

Dir: Vicky Jewson
Star: Noomi Rapace, Sophie Nélisse, Indira Varma,

Locked Up

  By

★★★½
“Trash of the highest order.”

Do not mistake the above rating for suggesting that this is a “good” movie. By most normal standards, it would hardly qualify. But what we have is a throwback to the glory days of exploitation, in particular Filipino women-in-prison flicks like The Big Doll House or Black Mama, White Mama. Here, schoolgirl Mallory (McCart) is sentenced to two years in Thailand juvenile detention after whacking a rich bitch classmate bully upside the head with a pipe (below). At first, the place seems almost like a holiday camp. Then, her guardian leaves, and Mall is taken out the back to the real facility, a cesspool of degradation and brutality, where the inmates are exploited in ways both sexual and violent. 

All the tropes of the genre are there. A sadistic warden (Weiss, apparently delivering her lines phonetically – which is actually perfect for her emotionally-dead character). Gratuitous shower scenes. A predatory lesbian, Riza (Maslova), who is naturally the one whom Mallory must eventually battle in the prison’s fight club, a death-match with freedom on the line for the winner. A nice lesbian, Kat (Grey), who takes Mallory under her wing and trains her in martial arts, as well as engaging in a lengthy session of canoodling with her. No prizes for guessing this was the scene where Chris walked in. [I swear, my wife has some kind of tingly, Spidey-sense for sleaze…] A prisoners’ revolt. Cohn, who also plays Mall’s guardian, adds his own grindhouse spin too, such as the scene where she captures a rat and eats it raw, after the warden off cuts her regular food.

In case any of the proceeding is in any way unclear, this is not high art. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed this for its melodramatic excesses and unrepentant approach to wallowing in what many would term the cinematic gutter. [Wrongly, I’d say, although that’s a topic for a separate, five-thousand word essay…] It helps that the performances are mostly on the nose; I especially enjoyed watching Maslova, who positively slithers her way around every scene in which she appears. At first, I was inclined to dismiss McCart, who in the early going, appeared to have one expression: permanently aggrieved. Then I realized, if anyone has good reason to be permanently aggrieved, it’s Mallory, since she’s pretty much a punching-bag for life, from the first scene to the last. By the end, I was rooting for her, every punch.

I would like to have seen more of the fight club, not least establishing Riza’s bad-ass credentials, and having Mall take on others as a build-up to the grand finale. There are also some unexplained story elements too, such as the question of why Mallory wants nothing to do with her father. Yet this is the kind of film where such things as the plot matter little, if at all. I stumbled across this accidentally on Netflix and had a blast. However, more than for most movies I review here, that comes with this caveat: your mileage may vary.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Kelly Ann McCart, Kat Grey, Maythavee Weiss, Anastasia Maslova

Bird Box

  By

★★★
“A not-so quiet place”

Malorie Hayes (Bullock) is nervously heading towards the birth of a child, supported by her sister (Hayes), when a mysterious epidemic of suicidal psychosis breaks out worldwide. In the ensuing carnage, Malorie finds shelter in the home belonging to the acidic Douglas (Malkovich), whose wife dies trying to help Malorie, and a small number of other survivors. They figure out the epidemic is triggered by entities of some kind who are now prowling the planet – if you see them, you are overwhelmed by your worst fears and kill yourself. The obvious defense is not to make eye contact. Yet how do you survive in a world you cannot see? Especially when it turns out that those who were previously psychopathically inclined are immune to the effects, and are free to roam that world, with their sight intact.

The structure here is a bit problematic, bouncing back and forth between the early days of the apocalypse, and five years later when Malorie and two children are making their way down a river towards a supposed sanctuary. This both robs the early scenes of some tension, since we know who will and won’t survive, and eventually leads to a troublesome and unexplained leap: how, exactly, did they get from stuck in the city, to farming in the middle of a forest? However, it manages to get by, largely on the strength of Bullock’s intensity. This is apparent from the very first scene, where she’s instructing the five-year-olds on their imminent journey, in a thoroughly unmotherly manner.

If you’re looking for an explanation, you’ll need to look elsewhere, as the film never provides any. I’m not sure whether the book in which this was based was any more forthcoming [one thing I do know is, in the novel and not the movie, the sanctuary was populated by people who had deliberately blinded themselves] This isn’t necessarily a problem: indeed, it has been a genre staple going back at least to Night of the Living Dead, to present an apocalypse and its consequences without rationale. Yet, the specifics of the event here seem particularly contrived e.g. simultaneous parturition, and if you’re overly concerned with story logic, this may prove troublesome.

Fortunately, the performances help overcome this – not limited to, but certainly highlighted by, Bullock’s. Her gradual evolution from someone who isn’t certain she wants to be pregnant, into a fiercely protective mother (even to someone else’s kid) is nicely handled, and convincing. She gets particularly good support from Malkovich, playing the jackass character who appears almost de rigeur in any apocalyptic scenario. As many have noted (and the review tagline suggests), there is more than a little similarity to A Quiet Place; though I found that rather underwhelming, and the brutally internalized nature of the threat here seemed considerably more effective. The prospect of having to lose your sight is certainly scarier to me, and if far from perfect, I found enough cheap thrills here to make the time worthwhile.

Dir: Susanne Bier
Star: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson

BuyBust

  By

★★★
“Slum dogs and millionaires.”

The unapologetically brutal war on drugs being waged in the Philippines by hard-line President Rodrigo Duterte has come in for criticism abroad – and this film chips in to the argument from his home turf. Philippines DEA agent Nina Manigan (Curtis) is assigned to a new team, the sole survivor of her previous squad, killed after being betrayed to the drug gangs. Their new mission is to arrest leading boss Biggie Chen (Atayde), luring him out of the slum where he operates to a more vulnerable spot. However, at the last second, Chen changes the location of the meet, and despite misgivings, the squad enter the Gracia ni Maria area which is Chen’s home turf. To no great surprise, this turns out to be an ambush. Half the squad is wiped out in the initial assault, and with Chen jamming their calls for backup, Nina and the surviving members have to try and make their way out of a severely hostile environment.

The closest cousins are probably a couple of other foreign-language cop pics: Brazil’s Elite Squad and Indonesia’s The Raid. It has the moral ambivalence of the former, being set in a world where “by any means necessary” is the standard credo of law enforcement. This is combined with the relentless, action-driven approach of the latter, pitting a small group of cops in a confined space against a numerically superior and highly-motivated enemy. One problem is, those two movies are among my all-time favourites, both certainly ranking in the best action films of the 21st century. That’s a high bar for BuyBust to match, and it comes up short. What I took away was, there is a limit to how long you can go, before running gun-battles in murky alleys eventually become a bit tedious. And it’s considerably less than the 128-minute running time here.

It works better when adding more variety to proceedings, such as when the threat comes instead from the mercurial locals, whose loyalties cannot be relied on – they’re as fed up of the collateral damage caused by the police, as of the drug gangs themselves. And Curtis herself is surprisingly good, given her cinematic background hardly suggests hard-core action (she’s been a daytime TV host in the Philippines for almost a decade). She gets decent support from MMA giant Vera, who basically plays a tank, in a role surely destined for Dave Bautista in the inevitable Hollywood remake. Yet there’s clearly more to survival than mere size, just as there’s clearly more to making a good action film than copious quantities of ammunition.

In this case, editing half an hour of the less interesting stuff might well make for a significant improvement. These sections are more or less a group of faceless grunts exchanging fire with another group of faceless grunts, while scurrying through a poorly-lit slum. Less of this, and more of the start and end, where motivations become considerably clearer than what we see (or, rather, don’t see) in the middle, might have allowed this to live up to the level of its inspirations.

Dir: Erik Matti
Star: Anne Curtis, Brandon Vera, Arjo Atayde, Nonie Buencamino

Tau

  By

★★★
“Artificial, more than intelligent.”

Julia (Monroe) is a petty thief, who is abducted from her house and wakes to find herself, along with other random low-lives, prisoner in a mysterious facility. All of them have an electronic implant in their neck, which gathers data as they are put through a series of tests. Using her thieving skills, Julia leads a breakout attempt, which is brutally foiled by the facility’s automated defense system, a robot called Aries. But the attempt brings her to the attention of Alex (Skrein), the man running the project. He’s a tech innovator, who has been working on a super-AI, called Tau (voiced by Oldman), and using the data gathered from his kidnapped subjects to make it smarter. Julia’s brain makes her particularly suitable, and with time running out before he has to present Tau to its backers, he sets her to work. But Julia begins building a relationship with Tau, with the aim of using its naivety to turn the AI against its cruel creator.

I was expecting something perhaps a little more like Cube based on the trailer and the early going, with more of Julia and the other prisoners going through the tests. However, that aspect is disposed of relatively early. This is possibly wise, since the whole “kidnapping for experimental purposes” angle doesn’t make much sense, with Alex clearly not short of money or smarts (he comes across as an evil cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – some may consider the word “evil” there to be redundant!). Why not come up with a method of research which doesn’t require the death of the test subject? Anyway, with the resulting blood mopped up off the floor by a squad of semi-autonomous mini-drones, it then becomes a three-hander, between her, Alex and Tau, as they fence for psychological, and occasionally physical, dominance inside the confines of Alex’s fabulous house.

This looks lovely (the director’s background and previous work has mostly been in the art department), and occasionally has moments of effectiveness: Tau’s love of music is endearing, and his voracious desire, fed by Julia, to learn about the outside world is almost childlike. I also liked Julia’s feisty physical presence; this transfers well across from her previous “final girl” roles, such as in It Follows, especially during her confrontations with Aries. But the script frequently veers off to far more obvious beats. The self-destruct system is particularly blatant in its foreshadowing. and if I’ve learned anything from this kind of movies, it’s that biometric sensors on doors are a bad idea. If you ever see one in a movie, you know they inevitably lead to someone losing the necessary body part e.g. an eyeball in Demolition Man.

The script likely would have benefited from ramping up the pulp quotient along similar lines, since it isn’t quite smart enough to succeed on brains alone. When it takes a more visceral and less cerebral route, such as the first escape attempt, it’s notably more effective than when it tries to be clever.

Dir: Federico D’Alessandro
Star: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman (voice)

Ingobernable: season two

  By

★★★
“Mexican stand-off”

The second season follows immediately on from the events of the first, with Emilia Urquiza (del Castillo) on the run, after being framed for the death of her husband, the President. It’s not long, however, before she’s brought into custody… at least for a while. Her friends in the resistance, led by Canek (Guerra), are still active however, and soon get her broken out, to continue the fight. It’s a lot less linear of a series, with a multitude of threads being spun, merged and dissolved in the ensuing power struggle for control. The interim president, who is more than slightly sympathetic to Emilia’s situation – even after she has taken him hostage (above) – calls an election to choose a replacement, with two main candidates. Curiously, the more “progressive” is the military officer. On the other hand, the shadowy “X-8” group and its leader Santiago ‘Santi’ Salazar (Franco), is working feverishly behind the scenes to consolidate its hold over the country.

It’s considerably more complex than the previous series, which was a fairly straightforward, “woman on the run” scenario. This time round, while Emilia is still the central character, she is just one of the many pieces which are moving round the chessboard, in a quest for power. It requires paying greater attention than your typical telenovela, and with hindsight, perhaps deserved better than the “viewing while I get in my daily treadmilling” that it received. It probably didn’t help that an entirely different actor took over the role of Emilia’s father in the second season, which confused the hell out of me [the original had health issues which prevented him from returning], or that one episode in the middle was entirely a dream!

I still generally enjoyed the murkiness, however, watching the characters navigate their way through treacherous shoals of shifting loyalties and hidden agendas. A bit of a shame about the ending, though let me remain spoilery vague. While “the act” in question obviously sets things up for a third series, it’s glaringly obvious as it approaches. Probably doesn’t help that I was already wondering why no-one had tried it. “The act” would have solved a lot of problems, for a lot of people, if carried out over the previous 26 episodes.

The main positive is the breadth of interesting and pro-active female characters here, beyond Emilia. The one particularly worthy of note is Ana Vargas-West (Ibarra), Chief of Staff of the President’s Office. She ends up even more deeply embroiled, as she tries to juggle her CIA employers, links to X-8 and an apparently genuine desire to help both Emilia and the country. Ana has really dug herself a hole with her fingers in so many pies, and it’ll take all her political skill to survive. There’s also Zyan Torres (Tamara Mazarrasa), a soldier who ends up working as the lieutenant to Santi, and Kelly Crawford (Isabel Aerenlund), lurking even further back in the shadows than X-8.

In line with its cable-ish location, the show remains a bit edgier than most, for example, depicting Emilia being fire-hosed down in order to extract information out of her while in captivity. While there’s no shortage of gunfire and death either, on the whole this season is closer to a Mexican House of Cards, with political shenanigans coming to the fore. Though I’m not sure how accurate a portrayal of Mexico it is: this isn’t exactly made in conjunction with the local tourist board, shall we say. Season 3 seems inevitable, so stay tuned. Or, I guess, subscribed…

Star: Kate del Castillo, Erendira Ibarra, Alberto Guerra, Luis Ernesto Franco

Perdida

  By

★★½
“Lost cause.”

The film begins with an Argentinian school-trip to a volcanic area, which goes badly wrong when one of the schoolgirls, Cornelia, vanishes. Despite an extensive search, all that’s found is her locket. 14 years later, the missing girl’s best friend, Pipa (Lopilato), is now a cop, channeling the guilt she still feels about Cornelia’s disappearance and her role in it, into work. After a mass to mark the anniversary of the incident, Cornelia’s mother visits Pipa, begging her to re-open the case. Despite initial qualms, she does so, only to find a restaurant-sized can of worms comes along with it. Pipa finds herself facing a serious criminal organization, under the control of a woman known as The Mermaid (Salamanca), whose tentacles stretch both around the world and into the past.

This is based on the book Cornelia, by Florencia Etcheves. Whether the same is true of the source novel, I can’t say, but the film is very clearly influenced by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and other entries in the Nordic noir genre, right down to the snowy, desolate Patagonian landscapes where the film both opens and closes. Pipa is the typical heroine of such things, far more skilled at dealing with evidence than people, although here subcontracts out any shady technological needs to her Lisbeth Salander-alike pal, Alina (Sabatini). I spotted the main twist early on too, though in the film’s defense, I’m not sure how much it was supposed to be a surprise, since it seemed blindingly obvious in its nature.

A bigger problem is likely what goes around it, with elements that seem to show up out of nowhere: maybe they’re explained better in the book? For instance, Pipa gets a key clue from an inmate at a lunatic asylum, yet I’m not sure how she discovered this. And if the heroine is apparently so guilt-ridden over Cornelia’s disappearance, and was propelled by it to make a career in law-enforcement, why did she not bother to re-open the case for almost a decade and a half? Lopato gives an okay performance, managing to make her spiky, loner character somewhat likeable – another key aspect of Nordic noir. However, I was more intrigued by The Mermaid, and her character arc. How does someone become so indifferent to the suffering of others? There’s scope for a Maleficent like retelling of this story, from her point of view.

This is more of a general observation than a specific criticsm, yet I get the feeling this kind of thing might work better as a TV series. The additional time available would allow an extended period over which viewers can get to know the participants and their quirks. The finale here certainly feels rushed, to the point that you barely have time to go “Hang on, that doesn’t make sen…” before it’s over. A fractured timeline doesn’t help in terms of the necessary building of relationships with these characters, and the final result comes up significantly short of the necessary amount of emotional impact.

Dir: Alejandro Montiel
Star: Luisana Lopilato, Amaia Salamanca, Rafael Spregelburd, Oriana Sabatini