Director: Agustin Diaz Yanes
Writer: Agustin Diaz Yanes
Stars: Susana Abaitua, Andres Gertrudix, Iraia Elias
Synopsis: A young Spanish civil guard goes undercover within ETA, the Basque separatist group, spending over a decade locating their hideouts in the South of France.
Europe is a patchwork group of countries that fought for centuries in order to draw the maps that exist today. In the second half of the 20th century, Europe saw a great deal of upheaval brought about by political movements of ethnic or cultural minorities that saw their chance to take back their ancestral lands in order to self govern. The Balkan nations after the fall of communism fought and redrew their corner of Europe to better reflect the cultural makeup of the region. Northern Irish peoples have wished for a long time to not be a part of the United Kingdom and to join with the rest of their island, the Republic of Ireland. For centuries Chechnya has attempted to buck the rule of Russia and establish their own autonomy. The same goes for the Basque people whose ancestral home is a patch of land that is encompassed by four provinces of Northern Spain and three provinces of Southern France.
She Walks in Darkness is a film that uses historical cases of violence perpetrated by the Basque separatist group ETA against the government of Spain. The film uses history as a basis for the story and not the true story of any one person within the Civil Guard, a national police force, or ETA. Instead of “based on a true story,” the filmmakers opted for a phrase like, this could be one of the many stories.
It’s a bold choice not to base the film on any one account. It’s kind of like a lot of films set during World War II. There are people present at historical events, but those people may be a fabrication or amalgam of people who existed. It gives the filmmakers more room to play with the tension and the suspense of the story. In many ways it also prevents someone from calling out falsities. The assassins who reenact real killings are never named, so that it’s less about the people who perpetrated the killings than the fact that they happened in that way.
Though, for a story about a sting of this magnitude and dedicated work, the film feels a bit dull. The tension is too thin in many scenes where it’s supposed to be overwhelming. There are some tense scenes, which include the opening. Before we even meet Amaia (Susana Abaitua), we watch her as she silently hands over the keys to a car to two men. The men drive away and Amaia goes on with her day as a teacher, which is intercut with scenes of a politician leaving city hall to get a meal. It’s kids singing and then the death song of bullets as the assassin does his duty and gets away.
It’s probably a problem with the period that the film encompasses. The main sting operation takes over a decade to come to fruition. There is a lot of waiting and investigative police work that goes into the operation. It feels as if we could have seen a couple of flashbacks, but stayed in the moments where Amaia closes in on the locations of the zulos, secret caches of weapons and materials, to give us more dramatic tension. It’s almost as if Amaia has no conflict or tension with her. Even with Amaia’s fiance’s all too subtle attempts to get her back to their real world, the job feels like there’s no great questions for Amaia. She’s a true believer from the beginning and rarely wavers. All of the characters are very black and white in that way. Their motivations are gray, but their actions are on those two poles.
She Walks in Darkness is an intriguing piece of historical fiction. There is enough to it that it will keep your attention. It’s a film that does the procedural and archival footage elements well. It just feels like we are kept at an emotional arms length most of the time. We never really have a deep affection for characters on either side. It feels like the film could be much tighter and have had a smaller scope and could have been something to behold. It is worth the watch, though, if you have a curiosity about this piece of Spanish history.
