It’s probably down to sheer coincidence, but crime-drama Marshland plays like a Spanish version of the first season of True Detective, as two cops (Javier Gutierrez and Raul Arevalo) investigate a string of grisly murder-rapes of young women in an insular, corrupt-to-the-core rural town surrounded, as the title might suggest, by boggy wetlands of mystery. There’s even faintly supernatural elements, weird bird imagery, and an all-too-typical failure to give the female characters any dimensionality beyond their victimhood.
The distinctly local spin here is that it’s set in 1980 when the nation was still transitioning from fascism to democracy, which gives one detective a shady backstory as an enforcer of the Francoist regime, thus motivating him to seek some kind of atonement. Although the plot is predictable, director Alberto Rodríguez puts it through its paces with skill and efficiency and throws in some striking stylised touches, such as drone-captured aerial shots that make landscapes look like the surface of an evil brain or capillary systems oozing secrets.
