Summary
The Truthers is compelling for a lot of its runtime, but its desire to have its cake and eat it, both narratively and thematically, ultimately leaves a sour taste.
The mystery of Netflix’s The Truthers is whether or not there’s really any mystery to it at all. Everyone in it is paranoid about one thing or another, from their own families to shady pharmaceutical companies, but the extent to which these things do – or perhaps don’t – come together is, in itself, the point. It’s an interesting approach for the Spanish drama to take, and it makes for an engaging feature, albeit one with an unavoidably anticlimactic ending.
The plot finds Ruth (Stéphanie Magnin) leaving her going-nowhere club bartender job in Berlin to return to her hometown following the unexpected death of her mother, Lucía (Fanny Gautier). By all accounts, Lucía fell over in the locked bathroom while drunk and hit her head. There’s no suspicion of foul play. But Ruth is immediately suspicious, since her mother didn’t drink and didn’t tend to lock doors, and even more oddly, her estranged father Martín (José Coronado) has become an obsessive conspiracy theorist who won’t stop going on about how a pharmaceutical company called Certyx is connected to the disappearance of a missing neighbourhood boy named Alejandro.
Ruth has a point, and Martin’s consistently weird and alarming behaviour, which includes locking himself in the attic study all the time, is worth a second look. But did he murder his wife? Are his claims about Certyx potentially kidnapping and experimenting on children valid? Both? Neither?
You can see why this is compelling, certainly in the early going. And to be fair, it remains compelling right up until the end, and even then, has an edge of unusual experimentalism about it, but I’m not sure its shrugging attitude is conducive to the positive word of mouth it’ll need to make a dent in Netflix’s overstuffed thumbnails. It mostly feels like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it, to be about multiple things at once, but its observations about the conspiratorial mindset are fairly shallow, and every potential mystery ends up being underserved by its desire to play both sides against the middle.
The performances, however, I rather liked. Magnin has to sell her distant relationship with her father – he justifies the suspicious details of her mother’s death on the grounds that she has been around so little recently that she had no idea how much things changed – and a burgeoning sense of suspicion about his behaviour, while Coronado has to be believable as both a demented conspiracist and a grieving husband and father. The latter, especially, is a nice needle-threading performance, worthy of some acknowledgement and respect.
He gets short shrift compared to Ruth, though, who also has a light romantic subplot with her ex, Arón (Alberto Olmo), who conveniently has a connection to Certyx. The procedural stuff is engaging because it really does seem like Ruth is on the right track and her dad’s bonkers, but the fact that the plot ends up being more complicated than that is both a gift and a curse, denying the mystery a pleasing payoff and keeping the family drama at arm’s length.
Perhaps most disappointing is the fact that The Truthers has nothing of real note to say about truthers. Martin is a walking cliché, believing in the most obnoxiously common conspiracies possible, and the movie’s ultimate conclusion, which I won’t spoil here, kind of misses the point about how these kinds of convoluted, self-justifying narratives can afflict otherwise-normal people thanks to a heady confluence of important factors that aren’t addressed here. It’s hard to totally explain what I mean without giving too much away, but there’s a very clear effort to justify anti-establishment paranoia as an outgrowth of something extremely specific, and I think that’s letting people off the hook too easily.
The sympathetic slant is everywhere, and continues through into a climax that is another clear case of wanting to be multiple things at once, some of them mutually exclusive. The problem with building a movie around a murder-mystery template and then only subverting the template at key junctures – notably where the payoff usually happens – becomes extremely trying by the end, and even though this is a serious and not altogether ineffective movie, it’s nowhere near as compelling as it would need to be to get away with this kind of approach. A genre flick is one thing; a genre deconstruction is another. But a movie that wants to be both at once, and sometimes neither, isn’t doing itself any favours.
