The Secret in Their Eyes (2009) Review

In 1999 Benjamín Espósito, retired from the Buenos Aires courts, sits down to write a novel about the case he never got over, the 1974 rape and murder of a young woman in her home, and goes back to Irene, the superior he loved and never told. Juan José Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri, adapting Sacheri's novel, move between the two decades, and the film is as much about what Espósito failed to say as about who did it.

Guillermo Francella, a comedian cast against type as Espósito's drunken, loyal sidekick Sandoval, gets the speech on which the investigation turns, about the one thing a man can never change. It leads to a five minute unbroken shot that swoops over Huracán's stadium, into the crowd and through a chase under the stands. Ricardo Darín and Soledad Villamil play a love story conducted almost entirely in glances, and Pablo Rago's grieving widower is the film's quiet heart.

The case unfolds in the violent years just before the 1976 coup, and the film understands exactly who let the killer walk. It won the foreign language Oscar, Argentina's second after The Official Story, and its final revelation is earned rather than engineered.