It's classic retro mystery film-making, made with an incredible eye for atmospheric detail

Rating: 9/10 (24 April 2010)

El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), director Juan José Campanella's pot-boiling mystery romance, comes to North America loaded with the freight-load of expectation. Earlier this year the picture picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, to some surprise, as it beat out two films everyone assumed were duking it amongst themselves: Michael Haneke's Das Weisse Band and Jaques Audiard's Un prophète, two absolutely astonishingly good films.
The bad news is that Campanella's film is not as good as Haneke's and Audiards are, but the good news is that it's a close-run thing. While Haneke and Audiard work at the outer limits of biggish-budget narrative film-making - coldly documenting the roots of fascism in the pettiness and cruelty of village life in 1910's Germany in the case of the former and grittily, violently exploring the tension between Arab and Corsican inmates in a Parisan prison in the latter - Campanella's film is old fashioned. Charmingly so, in fact.
Argentinian superstar Ricardo Darín plays federal justice agent Benjamín Espósito. Set partly in 1999 and partly in 1974, the film follows Espósito as he tries to complete a novel about a case that he had undertaken 25 years earlier, with the help of his alcoholic assistant Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) and ivy-league educated boss, Irene (Soledad Villamil). As the three investigate the case - the brutal rape and murder of a young woman - they must not only piece together enough evidence to find the killer, but also deal with Argentina's slide into political violence under Isabel Perón, a widow with his own agenda and a budding, impossible romance.
It's classic retro mystery film-making, made with an incredible eye for atmospheric detail, made by people talented enough to create suspense and old-fashioned thrills without having to resort to cheap action-movie shootouts. It's occasionally corny and often melodramatic, but it is stacked top to bottom with great performances - comedian Francella as the heroically dissolute Sandoval chief among them - and a script that takes us and the trio from authentic-seeming 1974 Buenos Aires dive bars to a riotous football match, from the paper-jammed offices of a well-meaning judge to the gleaming polished wood of a fascist, scheming operative. It succeeds because of its occasional corniness, because packaged along with everything else that the film does so well it doesn't offend, it just seems pleasant, and old fashioned and warm, an entertaining reminder of how un-glitzy, un-rock and roll mystery film-making used - and still can - be. 8.8/10