Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Javier Gutiérrez, Raúl Arévalo, María Varod, Perico Cervantes, Jesús Ortiz, Jesús Carroza, Salva Reina, Antonio de la Torre, Nerea Barros, Ana Tomeno, Paula Palacios, Claudia Ubreva, Lucía Arias, Chelo Castro, Jesús Castro.
Murder has always seen to be such a British fascination, the chance to play armchair detective is one that goes back before the days of the Penny Dreadfuls, before the days in which every lurid sensational aspect of the crime at hand was printed with salaticiousness and gore filled speculation and in which the art of the most despicable act grows with ever more standing in literature and art.
With the advent of the Nordic Noir murder literature and films, the rise in popularity away from the 21st Century sanitised delivery in which American crime dramas have delved into, it only feels right that the home of the murder mystery should start receiving its fair share of crime films in return and in the Spanish film Marshland, the return that is given to British cinema goers overflows with the suffocating and the dramatic.
The mismatched detective scenario has been so many times because like the best of clichés, it works to the point that it sets out to prove, that the lonely detective is never more in danger when he cannot trust his own partner. In Marshlands that faith and belief in someone is stretched, tightened at ever juncture of the investigation and when the unbreakable becomes destructive, when it threatens to take all that come into contact with it, that’s when the drama, the uncontrollable takes rage into its own hands.
Investigating two young women’s deaths in pre-democracy Spain, Juan and Pedro, played with great sincerity by Javier Gutiérrez and Raúl Arévalo, are not only distrustful of each other but the recognised symptoms of the dangers that small town corruption and silence can bring to outsiders. It is this reflection on the era of Spain’s history that was still held tight by the events and fallout of the Civil War that makes Marshland not just a police drama but the very act of holding a mirror up to the society in which silence, in which to close your eyes to atrocities acted upon a population was rife.
An intelligent film, Marshland wades into the murky waters of small town murder and frames it as a perfect analogy for life under harsh regimes. An excellent addition to Spanish language cinema!
Ian D. Hall