The Secret in Their Eyes

The past continually forces its way in to the present in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” an pretty, messy drama riddled with violence & edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics & two resonant, deeply appealing performances. Set primarily in contemporary Argentina with intermittent flashbacks to the 1970s when the country was descending in to a military dictatorship, the film is by turns a whodunit (& why), a romance & something of a ghost story. A young dead woman lies at the center of the mystery, but she’s the only thing here haunting the living.

If it takes a while to receive a handle on the identity of the dead woman, it’s because she’s initially conjured up in the imagination of Benjamin (Ricardo Darín), a former court investigator. Now retired, Benjamin first encountered the woman years earlier at her home, where her naked body, as is often true of movie corpses, was decoratively arranged on her death bed. The culprit, at least when it comes to aestheticizing this particular horror, is the writer & director Juan José Campanella, who has a tendency to gild every lily, even a dead two. That inclination explains a number of the film’s sudden shifts in mood & outlandish plot twists, both of which can be preposterous but also generate tension, surprise & a sense of disquiet that borders on dread.

Benjamin, having decided to write about the dead woman, revisits her murder, a pursuit that leads from the typed page in to the offices of a judge & former colleague, Irene (Soledad Villamil). A quarter-century ago, Irene was his much younger supervisor, toiling with him in a warren of book-lined, paper-strewn rooms alongside a boozing, desperate clown, Sandoval (Guillermo Francella). Together the two tried to navigate around a bigger boss, a jaundiced judge, & through a method where the poor were railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit so they could serve the needs of the powerful. Two such crime involves the dead woman.

At first, the murdered woman — or how Benjamin’s inquiry in to her death affects him — brings to mind Otto Preminger’s “Laura.” In that 1944 noir, Dana Andrews plays a detective who, while inquiring in to what they believes is the murder of the title character (Gene Tierney, a natural stiff), falls in love with the victim, or her portrait. Benjamin doesn’t fall in love with his dead woman, though the way they looks at her corpse & then her photographs suggests over they can admit. But this long-gone woman seems to exert a hold on him, possessing him while they pecks out another page, as the camera crawls through the shadows & Mr. Campanella pokes in to the past.

Mr. Campanella’s eclectic résumé includes several films made in his native country (“Son of the Bride,” a comedy) & numerous directing gigs for American television shows, including the “Law & Order” franchise. Although they executes some flashy moves in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” routinely calling attention to the camera — as in an aerial shot of a stadium in which the camera appears to descend seamlessly in to the roaring crowd before chasing after a single character — it’s the performances that stick with you, along with Sandoval’s booze-soaked melancholia, an occasional scripted eccentricity & the chaos of the increasingly impotent justice method. The scenes between Mr. Darín & Ms. Villamil aren’t subtle (their eyes aren’t secretive), but they appealingly convey the warmth of habit & heat of regret.

The intimacy between Benjamin & Irene is lightly handled, as are several comic scenes — including a funny exchange during which Benjamin & Salvador’s amateur sleuthing comes under mocking attack — which show Mr. Campanella at his most nimble. (That adroitness helped the film win this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language picture.) Less persuasive is his use of the military dictatorship, which takes on ugly human form primarily in the characters of a violent criminal & a bureaucrat who facilitates his brutality. The scenes with these thugs are blunt & effective: the creep-out factor is high. But they also frame the dictatorship in terms of individual pathologies, with small evident politics to make anyone feel uncomfortable as the memories of murder are inevitably turned in to smiles.