Ticket 2 Ride

Saturday Night at the Movies presents: The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

This is a superb thriller, a police investigation into a brutal rape and murder. This police procedural takes may different turns and leaps back and forward in time. I honestly don’t recall how I got turned onto this film, but it was riveting from the first frame to the last. Having an 89 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t hurt either.

Juan José Campanella directed the thriller, El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) based on the novel, La pregunta de sus ojos by Eduardo Sacheri. Not based on a real story, the film is supposedly a blend of fact and fiction.

A young wife is raped and murdered. The case is turned over to the Argentine Court for investigation. Despite two construction workers confessing to the crime, investigator Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín) doesn’t buy it. He pursues the real killer, despite roadblocks put in his path. He boss, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil) declares the case closed, until Espósito and his colleague Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) discover some new evidence, uncovered through unofficial means.

Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino) is arrested for the murder, but this is where the film spins in a different direction and you won’t know how the various stories will end, until the final frames. Espósito and Hastings develop a strong working relationship that borders on becoming personal, but they never cross that line. In most films they would just act on it and go from there. Director Campanella takes a deeper, more interesting route to explore how their differences influence how they view handling the case.

Campanella is quite creative with a camera, giving the film a bit of artistic show, but puts the camera directly into the action. His cast of fine actors, even when they are time-jumping, create depth and believable characters.

While the subtitles may deter some viewers, the quality of the film transcends any extra effort by the viewer.