Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben)

— Much of this film seems more like a traditional mystery with clues everywhere and the audience tasked with figuring out where they lead than a typical Asghar Farhadi film. Laura arrives at small Spanish town with her spirited, teenage daughter, Irene, and son, Diego, to attend her younger sister’s wedding, leaving her husband, Alejandro, in Argentina because of work. Her family surrounds her, including her aging father who harbors some resentment toward Paco, Laura’s first lover, who bought land from Laura below market price but has worked it over the years into a valuable vineyard with his wife Bea beside him. The wedding festivities are artfully handled, offering that sense of family and colorful celebration and love and laughter that’s not easy to convey. As the celebration continues into the night, Irene drinks a little too much and heads to bed, but when Laura goes to check on her later, she finds the bed empty and she's nowhere to be found. A ransom text comes next, along with a warning not to alert the police. From here on out, it could have been a routine who-done-it but, after many twists and turns, much as we’d like Sherlock Holmes to set everyone down and bring order to the chaos, the world Farhadi creates doesn’t work that way. He’s spent as much time on the layers, hidden beneath each player’s surface, revealing divisions going back years, resentments, jealousies, loves, tensions, embarrassments, secrets. All these divisions surface as a result of the crisis, when there’s plenty of anger and despair and desperation to go around—the layers both unite and separate, becoming the push/pull that adds texture (and drama) to a family. It’s a good film with fine actors but not a great film like Farhadi’s “A Separation.”

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[2018. 133 min. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. Starring Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Richardo Darin, and Eduard Fernandez.]
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/everybody-knows-2019