Ill-Informed Gadfly

“The Secret in Their Eyes” is a Latin lover of a thriller: It seduces you slowly, with suave confidence and courtly flair. This Argentine Oscar winner chronicles a murder mystery that spans a quarter century, but it’s no procedural. There are no red herrings, no gratuitous twists. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is adult, literate, restrained. Its themes of loss, stasis and long-dormant passions can be parsed from fleeting glances and tossed-off gestures. The movie begins in 1999, with Ricardo Darin as a retired federal justice agent who’s trying to write a novel about his investigation of a 1974 rape and murder. He reconnects with his former boss, the subject of his unrequited ardor. The sad-eyed Darin and the elegant Soledad Villamil make a handsome would-be couple with a deep, unspoken bond. Film acting doesn’t get any better. In the flashbacks, director Juan Jose Campanella keeps the exposition light and engaging, thanks to the irrepressible performance of Guillermo Francella as Darin’s drunken right-hand man. Then Campanella boldly disrupts the movie’s rhythm, using an exhilarating single shot to stage an elaborate pursuit inside a packed soccer stadium. He follows that up with an incendiary good-cop/bad-cop interrogation. It appears that justice will prevail, but Argentina in 1974 was corrupt and unstable, with Juan Peron serving his short-lived final stint as president. Picking up the case in calmer times, our hero confronts the psychic scars of the period. “The Secret in Their Eyes” wrings compelling human drama from crime, politics and the shortcomings of well-meaning people.