The Body (El Cuerpo) (Oriol Paulo, 2012): Spain

Reviewed by Christopher Stull. Viewed at the Metropolitan 4, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2013

I started my first Film Festival with a not so great Czechoslovakian cop drama, not a great first impression but I didn’t let it get to me. I kept my mind open and saw some amazing films, listened to cool directors and had an all around good time. Except for when I got sick on the last weekend but that doesn’t matter. You are here for the review, not my life’s story. I started with In The Shadow and almost ended with The Body but that would be too lucky.

The Body (El Cuerpo) is a Spanish murder mystery thriller that kept me guessing right till the end. And I say that with a straight face. It had a lot of plot twists. It begins with Detective Jaime Peña (José Coronado)returning from seeing his estranged daughter abroad and delving right into the theft of a dead body. The dead body happens to be Mayka Villaverde (Belén Rueda), a wealthy business woman whose husband, Álex Ulloa (Hugo Silva), is having a secret romance with a student of his named Carla (Aura Garrido)and was the one responsible for her mysterious death. Jaime brings Álex to the morgue to ask him questions about his wife. While there, mysterious things begin to happen, things that have a special meaning to Álex, things that make him believe Mayka is alive. The movie goes into two perspectives, one being Álex as he is tortured by the clues left by his allegedly living wife and the second being Jaime as he remembers his loss of his wife and struggling with it.

And that is where I stop the recap. This movie has too many plot twists to go over in one review, and I really don’t want to spoil it. The Body a really good thriller, and its tagline as Hitchcock style is not too far off. Its music was also akin to The Shining, but in the way that it perfectly fit the scene. The only things that were at all bothersome were the scenes of Jaime remembering his wife, which didn’t seem to fit but did end up paying off at the finale, and the interactions between Jaime and Álex, which I thought should have happened more often. This movie also had a lot of influence from tella novellas. It was really dramatic in the beginning, to the point where lighting flashed right at a dramatic revelation, which got a few chuckles from the crowd. Now since I won’t go into depth about the story, its only fair that I tell you that this movie really pays off in the end, so don’t write it off if some of it doesn’t make sense. Besides, watching Álex freak out at each clue is truly worth it all on its own.