Let’s be clear from the beginning: ‘The crooked lines of god’ is very enjoyable… yes you are willing to jump through the hoop of narrative inconsistencies. Some dialogues are embarrassing, the twists overlap one another without really having a dramatic charge (how, if we barely know the characters?) and its internal functioning has to force surprises without ever ending. Yes, you can enjoy the film, which we saw in San Sebastian, but for that it’s your turn to turn off the logical section of your brain and let yourself be rocked by the situations that are proposed. Otherwise, you are in for an excessively long movie without much to scratch. Honestly, it’s nice, but not crazy.
Sweet madness
I’m going to start this review with an exercise in sincerity: I have not read ‘The crooked lines of God’ nor am I ever going to pretend that I have. Even knowing that the work of Torcuato Luca de Tena is fantastic, my first approach to it has taken place in the form of a film… And I must say that Oriol Paulo’s film either has not managed to go beyond the literary tone, or else has relied too much that his turns were interesting enough enough to interest the viewer without the need to nurture the characters with something more than a simple trait.
And beware: for most of the film he manages to keep his doubts about whether Alice Gould’s state is a fiction caused by delusion or a reality. The problem is that the game ends up getting so convoluted and pigeonholing the characters, without any kind of nuance, into “good” and “bad”, that even the final twist does not provoke any surprise due to the tedium and the accumulation of topics that has passed through our eyes in its third act.
But it all has to be said: ‘The crooked lines of God’ begins magnificently, with a temporal variation that is presented in a masterful way looking for the complicity of the reader and the surprise of the novice. When this game with the conventional narrative is clarified, it also simplifies the film itself, which is still waiting for several minutes of useless verbiage. Once the mystery is solved, what is the need to continue? The two hours and twenty minutes become unbearable, a heavy slab that not even the best thrillers would bear. And this one is nice, yes, but it never gets any further.
Na, na, na, crazy
The film starring Bárbara Lennie, as much as it tries to go further, he does not manage to reach the high novel and stays in the pocketbook: the setting, which should be one of its strong points, remains in a simple scene without lifein which the only thing that matters is the protagonist and two other characters with a plot but no personality.
The script and the direction are not quite right in providing Alice’s story with different points of view or edges in her story: from the first moment, the narrative of the film makes us see that it is sane, and that the facts against her are just machinations of her husband and the head of the prison. As much as the public may wonder about it, it’s not thanks to ‘The crooked lines of God’, which fails to pose a playful thriller because he forgets that if the tape itself takes part in the game, it loses interest.
It would be one thing if Alice claimed to be a private detective but nobody believed her, or if she had a sea of evidence against her, but the tape treats her well, the employees row in her favor, the evidence reinforces her and only some details allow us to enter into the mystery. I wish I could say something else, but the film seems to be afraid to pose a real diatribe: the doubt is reduced to the minimum possible, and that affects the patience we can have watching it. Which, at some point, comes closer to looking at the clock sighing than enjoying its supposed dead ends.
A line too straight
Although it fails in the most basic in a story of this type, the mystery, the truth is that everything else rows in its favor: Barbara Lennie and Eduard Fernández, like yin and yang, are spectacular in their own way, and the narrative resources used by Oriol Paulo are surprising and stimulating, with some great scenes. It’s a shame that you have to take too many giant leaps to justify some of the details of the film to the point of making it implausible.
‘The crooked lines of god’ is a missed opportunity afraid of being both a thriller and a mystery movie, trying to lighten one and make the other simpler and ends up failing in both. There is material for a good movie, but would have needed to focus more on atmosphere, characters and plausible doubt: what remains is a fast food movie made with top quality ingredients. And it’s a real shame.