This certainly isn’t the first review to liken Marshland to True Detective but the comparison between this Spanish thriller and IMHO the best television drama of 2014 is damn hard to avoid. Elements of what makes True Detective so good are wonderfully here too. Two detectives who don’t particularly get on but complement each other investigate a string of murders in an eerie, swampy landscape. There are long drives along picturesque waterways and a sense of ominous beauty masterfully crafted by the filmmakers in both.
Marshland and True Detective also share a distinctly male point of view. The men are saviours and baddies – sometimes both round into one. Women are secondary and less complex; pretty (possibly slutty) young victims and concerned, powerless wives. (Don’t let that put you off, ladies. The baby blues of Spanish heartthrob Jesus Castro are worth the ticket price alone.)
While True Detective takes place in a bleak, disrupted world post-Hurricane Katrina, Marshland goes back further to 1980 when Spain was transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. The tense political setting allows for some good gnarled character stuff with the senior cop Juan (an excellent Javier Gutierrez) from the fascist era of bullying and boozing contrasting with the idealistic earnest rookie Pedro (Raul Arevalo).
Police work was so much more cinematic before wifi when tapping a phone meant physically connecting a recorder to a wire and photographs come from darkrooms. The search for the murderer is laden with too many cop flick clichés, but director Alberto Rodriguez’s command of visual language is atmospheric filmmaking at its finest.
