The Secret in Their Eyes

There’s a secret all right, and it’s how this sprawling but pedestrian drama nabbed this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (I’ve seen four out of five nominees, and Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon is the best in a walk.) Still, this is a case when the inflation of an award hurts more than it helps, and if you can get past the movie’s attempts to pastiche Citizen Kane with Law & Order (Campanella has directed many episodes of the latter), the novelistic pretensions conceal an engaging crime story about a prosecutor (Darín) reexamining a for-all-intents-and-purposes unresolved rape-murder case he investigated decades earlier.

Seesawing between the ’70s and the ’90s (and engaging with the fallout from Argentina’s “Dirty War”—a campaign against left-wing militants by the military government—in an oblique sense), the flashback structure creates more whiplash than tension; there’s the sense that the movie either needed a tighter focus or should have been a miniseries. Similarly, the protagonist’s 20-year flirtation with a coworker (Villamil) often seems like something from another film—as does the distractingly elaborate, apparent long-take chase sequence that constitutes Secret’s major set piece. But if the movie doesn’t exactly shoulder the burden of history, it passes muster as a mystery freighted with more than its share of coincidence and twists.

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