The Last Movie I Saw

What a rarity it seems to be lately, for a movie to treat its characters like real people and its audience as intelligent, thinking viewers. In some ways, The Secret in Their Eyes, an Argentinian film directed by Juan Jose Campanella, conforms to certain classic thriller genre conventions, at least in terms of its plot (about the dogged efforts of a court official to solve a particularly gruesome murder). But rather than constructing the story around the sort of phony set pieces that generally prevail in those type of films, intended to create an orchestrated sense of suspense, Campanella instead allows this one to unfold through detailed character exposition, where individual motives build from the interactions that define almost anyone's workaday world-- even those that don't entail murder. There's also a dimension to this film, largely told through flashbacks to the 1970's, that builds on the unique political situation in Argentina at that time, especially the phenomenon of "the disappeared" (when the repressive government merely disposed of its critics). I can't claim enough knowledge of that history to fully understand how that intersects with the mystery, but it's clearly a crucial element in one of the film's most powerful twists, and as such affects the capacity of the characters to pursue what they consider the moral path (which is obviously not the same as the legal process). In conjunction with the rich characterizations, it's this denseness of context, which is never confusing or distracting even though things are not spelled out, that makes me appreciate the trust placed by Campanella in his audience to think this through, and experience something deeper and more profound than the visceral thrills promised by something like Iron Man II or any other typical summer fare. The Secret in Their Eyes is definitely the best movie I've yet seen this year.