Review of Secret in Their Eyes (2015) by Christian C — 13 Mar 2016

Although it's a bit slowly paced, the story is exciting, tense and inventive. I did not see the ending coming at me. However, that is partly because the story was quite hard to follow. The story is presented both in the present and 13 years prior. The problem is that it's nearly impossible to tell what is happening now, and what happened 13 years ago. Sure, there a little hints (one character limps now; Ejiofor has a few specks of gray in his hair, though not many), but unless you're constantly doing a detail check, you can easily miss that you have shifted back or forward in time. It's really quite perplexing. In the end, I just gave up and decided if something seemed out of place, then I must have been watching a different timeline 10 minutes ago.

The performances were all strong and nuanced -- likely the best I've seen from Kidman. But even the best performances did not make the timeline easy to follow.