This Friday, June 9, it arrives in Spanish cinemas ‘The unknown woman’new feature film directed by Pablo Maqueda in which he leads to the big screen groominga play created by Paco Bezerra. All this information put in this way may be irrelevant for most of the public, where above all they will see here a thriller in the vein of ‘Hard Candy’, the film that launched the career of Elliott Page.
As in the notable debut of david slade, ‘La desconocido’ plays with the idea of an adult man harassing a teenager online and what happens in their first physical encounter. Of course, from there you choose to follow a different path in which you constantly plays with the viewer’s expectations but without ever falling for free spins or using deception as a way of surprising the public.
A sick give and take
Although there are more characters, everything in ‘La desconocida’ revolves around Manolo Solo and Laia Manzanaresto the point that the film suffers when it has to open a world that twisted microcosm that both inhabit to explain a little better who they are and what their motivations are.
It is true that even then it remains that increasingly sickly atmosphere that Maqueda knows how to promote here so well without ever losing a curious sense of normality, but the sensation of narrative escape prevails to add something that I am not entirely clear to what point it really adds something when what really interests us all is the twisted give and take between its two protagonists . And there it gets lost in tension, not because it disappears, but because it comes in another way that feels less satisfying.
In addition, it is inevitable that the viewer is suspicious at all times, since precisely one of the great advertising claims of ‘The Unknown’ is that contains countless surprises throughout the story that tells us, so it is impossible to face it without having a certain predisposition to distrust what it initially proposes. That is where keeping a greater unknown around them would have served curiously to enrich this exploration of the power that can be exercised over a person but also over the imbalances of the human psyche.
With that I do not want to destroy what Maqueda achieves here, well knows how to play very well with the contrast of open spaces in which its two protagonists are found at all times in the present part to go psychologically enclosing them more and more, thus downplaying everything that surrounds them to measure. This burden is also transferred to the viewer and is done by approaching the staging work from a strange elegance, as if it wanted to reflect that the monstrous is also part of our day to day. And that idea, which is still true, serves to feed the viewer’s concern for what is to come.
Perhaps that is why the generous use of flashbacks ends up working against him, since everything works very well until its use begins to become too frequent. It is true that the strong interpretative level It is maintained, but even there it is missed that everything continues to be focused on the interactions between Solo and Manzanares, since that is when ‘The Unknown’ shines most intensely.
I’m not surprised that one of the film’s strengths is that, either, since He has only been proving for a long time that he is one of the best actors in Spanish cinema and it seems lately he is beginning to be recognized as he deserves. Here it reflects very well the oscillations that a character who begins as a kind of sexualized version of the big bad wolf is undergoing but who, obviously, is not limited to that.
For his part, Manzanares has an even more complicated task on his handsWell, there comes a point where the film really starts to revolve around her and the script decisions that affect her character can lead to rejection by the viewer. In my case, I think that it falls somewhat below Solo, but also that it is perfectly chosen, since one of the keys was to find an actress capable of showing the most fragile and naive side but also of hiding many things behind that appearance. destitute youth.
Unfortunately, ‘The Unknown’ never fully rounds off what it proposes, since it is true that it is disturbing and that it does not seek surprise for surprise’s sake, but also that the tension that it manages to settle during its first half hour dissolves as soon as take a look back to better explain what is happening. In this way, what could have been a first class thriller and with a personal voice ends up staying in an estimable proposal but one that leaves a bittersweet taste in the mouth.
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