Malek Allari | Editor-In-Chief
The true meaning of thriller is when a novel, play, or movie has an exciting plot that revolves mainly around a crime. God’s Crooked Lines took the thriller to the next level when they added the psychological aspects of a detective going to a mental asylum. The events unfold when the detective discovers a murder in the asylum.
The Spanish movie starts with the main character, who is a private detective who works on taking a murder crime that happened in a mental asylum. After she gets admitted into the same asylum and fills out all the paperwork needed for it, she starts to piece together the mystery that happened there earlier, and she tries to contact her employer, the father of the murdered patient. However, she starts to find out that the asylum hides more than what it shows and tries to uncover the secrets from the outside. The director of the asylum discards all her stories that she is sane and keeps her inside the asylum against her will. I am not going to spoil the movie, but it is worth a watch.
The film combines the themes of love, betrayal, loyalty, hypocrisy, and the truth, which play a part in the entirety of the movie to try and find out whether the detective solves the murder or not. A story that makes someone question the truth of what we perceive and see might be entirely different, and in some cases, the lies that happen in the backstages of reality.
Characters’ perspectives play a huge role in this story in terms of seeing how they saw or spoke the truth and how much evidence there is to back it up. The movie centers around the detective but also tries to revolve around the good and evil characters behind psychiatrists, nurses, and their patients. Since the story is set in an asylum, the patients have a little more freedom and engage in group or individual counseling, rather than being in a hospital where rules are a lot stricter than in asylums. Knowing this information is crucial to the story because one of the questions asked during the movie is how the character got to be there or how did she get her hands on this item.
Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that the director and the story play with the timeline and shift it a little bit. It is a great element when it comes to storytelling, only when it makes sense, and in the movie God’s Crooked Lines, not only did they do it right, they exceeded the expectations of their viewers.
This brings me to the last point of the movie, in which International movies learn how to play with the story as well as give you a complete and unexpected plot and plot twists. Moreover, when it comes to which movies are more thriller than the others is the one who the viewer does not know where it is going, unlike American movies that contain the same elements in most, if not all, cases.