Description: Nominated for 5 Goya Awards (Best Cinematography, Best Lead Actor, Best Lead Actress, Best Original Score and Best Sound) and based on a novel by the well-known writer Antonio Muñoz-Molina, this nerve wracking thriller describes a crime in a small provincial city, where a young girl’s body is found brutally murdered in the woods. Obsessed by the grizzly murder, the lead inspector searches throughout the city for a glimpse of the killer’s gaze that might explain the crime. Just as in real life a murder does not stop with the crime itself, but it affects all the people related to the victims and the murderer. The discovery of the young girl’s body proves to be the key that unleashes a series of events that include a man and a woman’s first meeting, why the man is forced to face his dark past, and why the woman falls in love with him.
How Crime affects those touched by it The quality that stands out in my mind in this movie is the acting of 12-year-old Noelia Ortega, the girl who was almost killed by the child killer. Her performance was as believable and authentic as it can possibly be. As the killer marches her through a busy shopping area, she looks and acts so scared that she couldn't scream out, even when he takes her past two police officers. She is not killed, and when she finally is able to move, her fingers move slightly as if to check if she really was still alive. Then, she struggles to get her panties out of her mouth, where her assailant put them to keep her quiet. Finally, totally naked, she struggles up the riverbank and across a footbridge until some people see her and take her to the hospital. [Not bothering to look for her clothes indicates to me that her first concern was her life, not social mores.] Her identification of the young man, her talks with the detective, everything is extremely authentic for what IMBD shows as her first movie.
Since my movie expertise is with movies dealing with children, that is what I look for first in a movie. This movie is about two girls, one killed and one who survived, and how what happened to them affects the people that are touched by the attacks. One is the first girl's teacher, another is the detective who investigates the case, another is a kindly Catholic priest who knew the girl as well as having had the detective in his church school in the distance past. The detective goes to the priest for counselling, or just to 'unload.'
While the year and actors in this listing seem to be wrong, the description of the story seems right. If so, it received 5 Goya Awards (Best Cinematography, Best Lead Actor, Best Lead Actress, Best Original Score and Best Sound), and it certainly deserves the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. It is not really a suspense movie, although there is one segment that is quite tense; it is a movie about people. If you like movies about the lives people, and how one event affects them, you will like this movie.
An Elegant Mystery, Thriller, and Love Story LUNA LLENA is a captivating, haunting, superb film from Spain. Director Ana Christina Henriquez, using a screenplay adapted from Antonio Munoz Molina's novel by the same name, displays uncanny skills for weaving the horrifying murder of a small girl, the subsequent effects this brutal murder has on the small town in Spain (on the populace, the parents, the priest, the school, etc), the investigation of the murder and a subsequent near murder, and the parallel development of relationships of love, understanding and self-acceptance among the lead characters. The Detective (Miguel Angel Sola in a fine performance) comes to the story with a past that includes a wife confined to a mental institution, alcoholism, and other aspects about which we never learn. The murder profoundly affects this man who has always thought he didn't care to have children, and he turns to the town priest for paternal and emotional advice. He also encounters a schoolteacher whose husband left her with her infant son 14 years ago ( Adriana Ozores - as sensitive an actress as any on the screen today) and despite their personal pasts, the two fall in love. The murderer is made known to the audience very early in the film and watching his psychopathic development compounds the visceral anxiety of the tenor of this movie. The murderer believes that the Full Moon drives him to evil: the Inspector and the schoolteacher feel the influence of the Full Moon as an instigator in their new love. The way Henriquez elects to use the cinematography, the pacing, the musical score, and the careful character delineation are nothing short of phenomenal. With excellent performances by Juan Diego Bola, Fernando Ferman-Gomez, Charo Lopez, among others, this is a brilliant film. In Spanish with English subtitles.
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