Marshland
The detective film set in the recent past – critically reflecting on the socioeconomic problems of its setting, with serial murder as a symptom of a rotting, diseased and overripe society that cannibalises its most vulnerable – is emerging as a bona fide subgenre within contemporary film noir. Spanish auteur Alberto Rodríguez’s latest release, Marshland, easily holds its own with the stalwarts of this fascinating and cinematically rich subgenre, which includes the likes of David Fincher’s Zodiac, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and Chris Gerolmo’s Citizen X.
In tone and subject, Marshland is perhaps most like the prestigious first season of True Detective, swapping out the post-industrial, socially and geographically devastated gothic of the American Deep South for Andalucía's geographical and political backwaters, sharing True Detective’s mismatched cops, deeply ingrained misogyny and the casual cruelty of corruption at every level of society.
In 1980, as punishment for whistle-blowing in Spain’s uneasy Post-Franco democracy, idealistic policeman Pedro (Raúl Arévalo) is sent to the Spanish marshlands to investigate the disappearance of local teenage girls, pairing up with Juan (Javier Gutiérrez), who's rumoured to be ‘The Crow’, a once ruthless member of Franco’s gestapo, the Political-Social Brigade. The tense working partnership between Pedro and Juan mirrors Spain’s ‘Pact of Forgetting’, an amnesty law that forgave crimes against humanity under Franco’s dictatorship to supposedly ease Spain into proto-democracy, albeit one in which every palm must be greased in order to stop the serial killer – even the locals whose daughters are in danger must be paid.
Rodríguez captures this suffocating and inescapably corrupt world through a noirish, gothic cinematography, filtering the bucolic, halcyon Andalucían landscape through surreal and nightmarish orange-sepia tones. In this hellish Post-Franco geopolitical landscape, the waters between serial killers and the 'good' guys are muddied at best.