Even though the uncrowned king of Spanish thrillers Alejandro Amenabar in his film Thesis, which in 1995 won seven Goya awards, refers to his celluloid heroes overly explicitly, which is a result of his avid love for films, it is in fact a film whose dirty cinematography, dark atmosphere and hellish labyrinths of snuff perversions show how its Hollywood match 8mm should have looked like had it not been directed by Joel Schumacher.
The same goes for the impressive noir Secret in Their Eyes by the Argentinian director Juan Jose Campanella and produced in Spain. Shortly after it was made Billy Ray directed its Hollywood remake starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Hollywood versions of characters portrayed in the original by Soledad Villamil, Carla Quevedo and Ricardo Darin. However, while Campanella’s film plays on the card of existential tones in which love and justice become the key points to which the loneliness of the author’s protagonists gravitates to. Meanwhile the eyes/glance don’t have merely an existential value but rather become the driving wheel of the objective time of narration and the subjective time of heroes. On the other hand in its Hollywood version plays on the card of the typical post 9-11 mass paranoia and overall insecurity.
Even though he is originally from Argentina, Campanella uses the typical mechanisms of new Spanish thrillers that surpass the genre clichés and put in the foreground the complex and ambivalent human architecture. Thus these mechanisms are probably best depicted by the ground made up from fluvial arteries and aortas that intertwine the sweltering, humid and foggy estuary of the river Guadalquivir, reminiscent of the surface of a brain, in the opening shot of Alberto Rodriguez’s Marshland. It is pure expressionism of nature in which Earth acts completely disinterested. Namely, Rodriguez’s story is at the same time spiritual as well as physical. This same estuary becomes something similar to the cut-off ear in Lynch’s Blue Velvet through which the author penetrates into the thirty thousand hectares of rice fields and probes the hero’s turbulences and fears. Sometimes those fears are political (see the scene in which the detective takes off the cross ornamented with the portraits of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco from the hotel’s room wall). It is a film about the secret in his (detective) eyes. It is a film about a glance and observation. It is a film about collective turbulences that evokes Bong Joon-ho and his film Memories of Murder. Namely, Rodriguez’s heroes follow and spy the alleged murderer, as well as each other because they are researching their own dark and traumatized past in parallel with the official investigation of a murder. There is always someone hidden and secretly observing somebody else. There is even the character of a clairvoyant who observes from the inside.
What the detective’s eyes represent in Marshland, the same is embodied in the camera of the character Pablo Rosso in the seminal piece by the director Jaume Balaguero Sleep Tight. He is the invisible hero of the author’s zombie horror film REC. His voice and his eyes. His character of the superintendent in a robe (the original Luis Tosar), portrayed as your typical neighborhood psychopath, says for himself that “he was born incapable of happiness”. The story plays on the card of the tedious process of detection. What is the nature of his relationship with Clara? Why is the twelve year old Ursula blackmailing him? How far is he going to go with his perversions? Even though Spain is experiencing a tough time, Balaguero’s angel of destruction is closer to Norman Bates than Bunuel. Therefore there is some damn symbolism in Bacharach’s song 'Keep Me in Mind' performed by Patty Page in Balaguero’s film.
On the other hand, Gerardo Herrero (Silencio en la nieve) sets the genre of a thriller in the historical framework of the WW II, more precisely on the chaotic Russian front, where a Spanish soldier, member of Franco’s Blue Division is forced to resume his role of a police detective once again. In his brutal pulp film La caja 507 dwells into the dark side of the sunny Costa del Sol and probes the institutional corruption, world of bankers, investors and developers. It is the same milieu in which Glazer’s Sexy Beast managed so well for himself. (Dragan Rubeša)