Summary
That Night masquerades as a thriller, but it uses the genre trappings to interrogate a sibling bond in surprising and interesting ways.
You shouldn’t be too complacent with That Night, which at first blush looks a lot like a thousand other Netflix crime thrillers. The Spanish ones tend to be good, to be fair, but that isn’t really the point. The point is that the six-part miniseries adapted from the novel by British author Gillian McAllister isn’t really a crime thriller at all, at least not in the way you’d probably expect.
There’s a crime, obviously. And there are thrills, intermittently, helped along by rapid pacing thanks to only six half-hour-ish episodes. But the death of a policeman and the hasty cover story concocted by the three sisters implicated in it isn’t really the point; the opening of the very first episode reveals that the sisters are arrested for murder, and the show isn’t shy about revealing what happened, to whom, and a large part of why. Instead, the screenplay, adapted by Jason George and Spanish screenwriter Lara Sendim to help in transplanting the plot from Italy, as in the novel, to the Dominican Republic and Pamplona, Spain, delves into the very specific family dynamic that compelled three sisters, all with something of their own to hide, to go to such extreme lengths to protect themselves and each other.
The general premise is simple enough. During a vacation, Cris (Paula Usero) makes the rash decision of remaining in the Dominican Republic to open an animal shelter. Some time later, her sisters, young single mother Elena (Clara Galle, Through My Window, as well as its sequels Across the Sea and Looking At You) and pregnant Paula (Claudia Salas, Elite), who is accompanied by her wife, Luisa (Nüll García), travel to visit her. While they’re there, Cris and Paula are summoned to the beach by Elena, who happens to have the corpse of a policeman tangled up in her bumper. An accident? A murder? Either way, the sisters immediately conspire to cover up the crime, for various reasons best left unmentioned here, and step by step their hasty scheme unravels into more and more chaos.
Nothing out of the ordinary there. But That Night takes a novel approach to this familiar core plot by framing each episode in the perspective of a different character, and then exploring the days leading up to and immediately following the death. This is the show’s smartest formal decision, since it avoids the usual thriller rhythms of procedural investigatory legwork and one-more-episode cliffhangers by instead presenting the full story out of the gate, more or less, and then gradually peppering it with more and more context as it goes. There are some shortcuts to help this work – brief moments of teasing voiceover for the audience’s benefit – but for the most part, it’s a very organic and satisfying way to build out the details of a compelling story.
Each sister is sharply cast and psychologically complex, and their dynamic is deeply unusual thanks to a long-ago trauma and their father Javier’s staunch religious conservatism. The “twists”, such as they exist, come from each layer of personal protection being gradually stripped from these characters, revealing their innermost anxieties and traumas and slotting them into a wider familial and cultural context. As you understand more about each sister, you understand more about why certain things happened and why each increasingly poor decision was made in their aftermath. The finale, which risks being gimmicky thanks to a surprising perspective flourish, ends up being a resonant payoff for everything preceding it.
But it’s not a crime thriller. It’s important to know that going in to appropriately manage your expectations. It is, though, a surprisingly heartfelt, psychologically complex, and impressively developed family drama that is well worth checking out, even for genre fans who initially assumed it was something different.
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