Marshland

Synopsis:  Two homicide detectives, Juan and Pedro (Javier Gutiérrez and  Raúl Arévalo) are sent to the Guadalquivir marshlands, a rural region of Andalucia in southern Spain, to investigate the murder of two teenage girls.

Marshland is a gripping crime thriller that at times recalls David Fincher’s Se7en although it is a more realistic, less contrived story of a couple of ill-matched cops in a race to catch a serial killer. Both films also share a powerfully-created sense of pervading evil.  Atmosphere is a particularly strong card here, particularly for non-Spanish audiences as the linguistic differences can at times make the complicated plot somewhat difficult to follow whilst the general backdrop of the waning years of Franco’s dictatorship will, needless to say, resonate more with those who have lived through it (the film won 10 Goya Awards including Best Film and Best Director).

Nevertheless, the sense of place and time is palpable and they underpin the fear that we feel from the presence of an unknown killer brutally slaying teenage girls. Police and City Hall corruption and drug-smuggling are also lurking realities of a poor region whose inhabitants must struggle to survive by any means.

Director and co-writer Rodríguez deftly melds his ingredients, rarely over-playing his hand and consistently leaving us to draw our inferences from carefully placed cues, some of course, in the best thriller tradition, being red herrings.  All this is permeated by the well-drawn relationship between the two detectives: Juan, the old school, hard-drinking Franco-era cop with an end-justifies-the-means approach to his job and, Pedro, a dour Left-leaning city liberal with no faith in his partner.  The dynamic between the men and the way that it works to solve the crime is one of the many elements in a multi-layered film that brings together the personal and political.

Despite the visually beguiling titles and the intermittent retreats to an aerial perspective, the depiction of the murdered victims are grisly and the look of the film is overcast by the deep shadows of  the Franco regime with the marshlands - boggy, meagre and featureless  - making an apt setting for this story of predatory cruelties. 

Marshland is far from being light-hearted fare but it is compelling.

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