God's Crooked Lines

The novel behind this film was written by an author who genuinely had himself committed. For Los renglones torcidos de Dios, published in 1979, Torcuato Luca de Tena voluntarily entered a psychiatric clinic for eighteen days and learned institutional life from inside it. The story: a private investigator named Alice Gould fakes mental illness to get into a psychiatric hospital and investigate a patient's suspicious death. Once the door locks behind her, staying certain of her own sanity proves harder than she expected. Oriol Paulo directed and co-wrote with Guillem Clua and Lara Sendim. Bárbara Lennie plays Alice and Eduard Fernández the hospital's chief psychiatrist. It was made for €7m across nine weeks of shooting between May and August 2021. The hospital is not real: exteriors used the old Tabacalera building in Tarragona, built in 1923, and interiors a former Mercedes plant in Barcelona. It arrived on Netflix on 9 December 2022. Who it is for: viewers willing to give it a hundred and fifty minutes, who enjoy unreliable narration and a thriller that keeps changing sides. Who it is not for: impatient viewers. It is long, the middle stretch drags, and some clues are held out far too early.