Infiesto Review: Fear and Loathing During The First Lockdown | Netflix Film

Cast: Isak Ferriz, Iria del Rio, Juan Fernandez, Ismael Fritschi, Ana Villa

Director: Patxi Amezcua

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Infiesto is the latest Netflix Spanish movie to be released on the platform on February 3rd. Two detectives are called to a small mining town in the mountains of Asturias where a young woman, presumed dead for months, has suddenly appeared. As the world crumbles, the detectives quickly realize that the virus might not be the only dark force at work. Written and directed by Patxi Amezcua, starring Isak Férriz, Iria del Río and Luis Zahera, it is filmed in different locations in the Asturian mining area and Galicia. In our review of Infiesto, we will delve into the plot of the Spanish film to understand how much Amezcua’s film takes full advantage of a certain cinema and a certain quality seriality of recent years without however proposing a truly original or memorable product, a prisoner of own substantially misplaced ambitions.

Infiesto Review: The Story Plot

A small village in Spain that we know little about. A girl moves towards the camera, visibly shocked. Everything starting from the atmosphere, the colors and the soundtrack suggests nothing else: we are facing a full-blown Netflix thriller. The only exception: the film is set in March 2020 at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the narration of Covid has nothing to do with the plot, the film focuses on another topic. The story of Infesto is told through the investigations of two detectives who go against a ruthless subject who kidnaps young women and young men. The latter become the victims of a sacrifice in the name of a “higher power”. Soon, the film focuses precisely on the manhunt and within an hour and a half completes the investigation – with some questionable twists.

Some secondary aspects of the plot are thrown into the wasteland of investigative information and are subsequently abandoned. Although at times, it lacks a linear thread, Infiesto presents itself to the viewer as a cold-colored thriller that wants to convey to the viewer the feeling of immersion in a surreal world. The plot that is written and directed by Patxi Amezcua walks a long thin thread of challenging events. Isak Férriz and Iria del Río give the faces to the protagonists of this film as two agents we know little about. Except for some information left to understand, a characterization of the characters would have been useful.

Infiesto Review and Analysis

Infiesto, which arrives on Netflix on February 3, is a thriller in its own right. The genre that most of all triumphs on the platform brings a mix of action, suspense and adrenaline to the small screen. The Spanish film entertains the viewer – thanks to the 90 minutes of which the film is made up – who, however, cannot fail to ask questions. The city that is the setting for the film is deserted, it looks like a post-apocalyptic world where a zombie could appear at any moment. While the two agents, Garcia and Castro work tirelessly on the case of the girl found, the days of isolation increase and the first cases of Covid knock down the small town of Asturias.

We are not allowed to empathize with the two protagonists: we must deliberately know little about their stories. Detective Castro tries to briefly solve this violent crime while his partner contracts Covid. Apart from this mention, we do not enter into the dynamics of governments or the international management of the pandemic. Covid punctuates the telling of the story by dividing the film into the various days of lockdown. The crime that hit the city takes place in the first 10 days of forced confinement due to the growing spread of the virus. The story of Garcia, played by Isak Férriz, is also poorly articulated. We know that he takes care of his mother in a nursing home and that he has a tormented past that resurfaces in one of the film’s goriest scenes. The violence with which he will interrogate one of the main suspects in the kidnapping investigation will be an alarm bell for the fate of his character.

Of course, it takes guts to make a film set during the first lockdown, about three years after those dramatic first months of 2020, when the Coronavirus was entering the television sets of homes all over the world, the hospital wards of our cities and in our fragile and frightened psyche: Perhaps, therefore, it is a good thing that the Spanish director and screenwriter found the right key in the writing phase to decline the pandemic and its terrible and unexpected consequences in our daily lives in a detective story sauce. A narrative line, the purely investigative one, which goes hand in hand with the tightening of the rules of isolation and containment of the virus, the parallel soul of Infiesto which gives the original Netflix film its peculiar identity. Talking about the Covid pandemic with the tools of the investigative story is undoubtedly a gamble that could have produced a tantalizing and original package in the cinematographic panorama endorsed by the powerful streaming platform. Too bad that Infiesto has very little interest and originality.

What most strikes the viewer in front of Patxi Amezcua’s film is the blend between a pure and hard investigation story, exciting and full of echoes from decades of television tradition linked to the genre itself, and a caustic and pessimistic examination of the state of society current western world, still in the grip of the global pandemic and forever changed by those fateful and dramatic months of 2020. Yet, three years after the onset of the Coronavirus nightmare, the average public is fed up with hearing about the consequences, albeit pregnant with narrative urgency and contemporary debate, of Covid on everyday life; perhaps because after almost three years of restrictions and overturned everyday life.

The result, of course, is that in the end, it seems much more interesting to follow the parallel plot of the two protagonists of Infiesto than the consequences of the Spanish lockdown (whose days since its establishment mark the narrative chapters of the film and the search for evidence and answers from the two police inspectors), grappling with a sinister sect that kidnaps teenagers from the town of Asturias to sacrifice one of them every three months, in conjunction with the equinoxes and solstices. An ancestral and violent response to the will of Taranis, the Celtic god of the storm demands a human sacrificial victim at the turn of a life cycle and the beginning of a new one. Waiting for the prophesied end of the world.

But the long-awaited end of all the things that the ancestral sect testifies to wanting to advance seems, in the end, to coincide with the closing of an era and the opening of a completely new cycle, absolutely unprecedented for the human race: obviously, we are talking of the one marked by the merciless arrival of the Coronavirus in everyday life. A narrative device that on balance does not work as Infiesto would like, which is between the allegory of today’s times and a detective story with clear influences from far more successful and seminal products such as True Detective, fails miserably in terms of effectiveness and immediacy.

Paralleling the speed with which the virus spreads in Infiesto, the mystery surrounding the missing girl deepens. The detectives try to follow the tracks starting from the place where the teenager was found. Starting from that and following a long trail of possible suspects, something is immediately perceived by the attentive spectator’s eye. Out of any logic that provides for the inclusion of the local police within this type of investigation, just a policeman (whom we will never see with his face uncovered, if not at the end) proves willing to help the detectives – even to provide a business card to detectives.

After a series of more or less apparent twists and turns, the adrenaline rises in Infiesto because we are about to face the number one suspect: The Prophet – or rather Ramos, who seemed so strange to us. The story of this Prophet, as he calls himself, belongs to a past time when he had already struck numerous victims. Like a sort of Charles Manson, he was able to attract young men and women to his cult. Initially, however, everything happened consensually until the pandemic arrived. From that moment, the Prophet – as called by his god – worked for a greater good, a fanatic who branded his victims.

The end of the world is near and is represented by the last moments of the film, in the final confrontation. It is that journey to the center of the earth that Castro takes in the mine elevator that takes Castro to the center of the Underworld, to the core of the earth. There the character of Iria del Río will face the Prophet in a fight that is not very exciting, but rather linear and obvious. Infiesto initially makes good use of the first twists, a crescendo that makes the investigation quite articulate, albeit with some flaws. However, the realization leaves something to be desired and is at the mercy of the viewer who finds himself at the end of the film seen without an explanation that does not refer to the classic “greater good”.

Infiesto Review: The Last Words

Despite some gimmicks and goodwill, Infiesto is a Netflix original film that will soon be forgotten. Not only because it has the presumption to tell the worst days of the Coronavirus pandemic through the fil rouge of the investigative narrative structure, but because it sinks hands fully into the most recent television imagery (True Detective) without ever paying homage to it with originality.