Review of Prince of Shadows (1991) by Millo T — 27 Dec 2011

This film noir, set in Spain during the years of dictatorship, has all the ingredients of the classics of the genre: good actors and performances, an intriguing blonde, men who are trapped by their pasts, good aesthetic, well-chosen soundtrack and even a manifested deep love by classic cinema.

However, the lack of a real chain of events but just a group of stopped temporal continuuum and flashbacks makes the narration slow, not really catching you in any moment (there are certain moments in which the flashbacks and their repetition make you understand the feelings of the main character, but the resource doesn't completely succeeds).

Although the motivations of some characters are explored, others seem forced and hardly explained, and that is more revealed even at the end. The dramatic tete-a-tete are well solved, but the action or confrontation scenes don't match with the previously developed dense atmosphere.

In summary, a movie that could have been much but didn't achieve all its potential. I ask myself if the original book from Muñoz Molina is better (as -you know- a book is much better to show a frozen moment than a movie), but I have my doubts about that (I read a previous book from Muñoz Molina and seemed to me that have that same defect, and the way to write didn't compensate the problems: and I am someone who likes books which do not tell you anything -or are describing just a situation or a general feeling-, if at least they make believe you are doing).

When you make a movie/book with few events, it is required a very good hand to manage it, and in this case, some of that would have been needed.