A Widow’s Game (now on Netflix) is a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie based on the story of the “Black Widow of Patraix,” a murder case that played out in Valencia, Spain in 2017. Ivana Baquero (the then 10-year-old protagonist of Pan’s Labyrinth) stars as Maria Jesus Moreno Canto, nicknamed Maje, the widow in question who was convicted of conspiring to murder her husband, and filmmaker Carlos Sedes structures the salacious drama as a narrative from three perspectives – Canto, her easily manipulated lover and the detective investigating the death. It’s a compelling film, but has us wondering what it’s really quote-unquote about.
The Gist: Aug. 16, 2017: Antonio’s body was found in a parking garage, stabbed multiple times with a large kitchen knife. Eva (Carmen Machi), the detective on the case, is the primary subject of the movie’s first act. She locks down the scene. It doesn’t look like a robbery. Whoever stabbed Antonio had to be pretty strong. “Pure rage” is the assessment of what likely fueled the murder. Eva assembles her team and scrawls the “big three” motives on a whiteboard: drugs, money, love. She attends the funeral, and Antonio’s widow Maje (Baquero) delivers a wrenching, tearful eulogy. Eva raises an eyebrow. Eva interviews one of Maje’s friends, who reveals that Maje was frustrated by her husband’s “controlling” demeanor, and that Maje had been secretly seeing other men. Eva’s interactions with Maje are complex – is Maje’s volatile emotional state a reflection of guilt or grief? It could go either way. Eva argues with a judge to get a warrant to tap Maje’s phone. She gets it. Two months later, Eva and her staff listen to a recording of a call from a number and man they don’t recognize yet. Who is this guy?
Next, we learn more about Maje. We see her and Antonio, beaming on their wedding day in 2016. They lived in an apartment undergoing expensive renovations, funded by her two nursing jobs, by day at a retirement home and by night at a hospital. Maje often lies to Antonio so she can go out dancing and drinking with a friend, and frequently hooks up with other men. She justifies her actions: “You have no idea how violent he gets,” she insists. This statement is incongruous with scenes in which she and Antonio argue like a typical couple going through a rough patch – vague accusations, angry words, divorce threats – while she fibs about where she was last night. It goes much farther; “I’ve even thought about killing him,” Maje texts to a friend. In a moment of emotional turmoil, Maje meets up with an older man, Salva (Tristan Ulloa), and his supportive, fatherly presence is curious. Who is this guy? The guy in the phone call Eva eavesdropped on, that’s who.
And then, Salva’s story. He’s also a nurse at the hospital, Maje’s coworker, a middle-aged man with a wife, a teenage son and an ailing, hospitalized mother. Maje shows affectionate interest and he’s flattered. Two closeups tell the story: In one, he brushes hair dye on his graying temples. In another, his face is buried between Maje’s thighs. He calls her “buttercup” and they exchange spicy texts. She gives Salva the same story about her abusive husband; meanwhile, she’s also meeting and sleeping with Dani (Joel Sanchez) after they met and schtupped in a nightclub bathroom. The leash Maje has around Salva’s throat is invisible, but it’s there. Trust me, it’s there.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A Widow’s Game is no Anatomy of a Fall or Gone Girl, but it draws on films of that ilk, exploring the extreme ends of troubled marriages.
Performance Worth Watching: Machi is a veteran character actor who gives a well-honed performance as a no-nonsense cop. You’ll wish you got to spend more time with her.
Memorable Dialogue: Eva gets a big laugh, reacting to a particularly revealing wiretapped phone call with two simple words: “My god.”
Sex and Skin: Female T and A; a couple of medium-hot sex scenes.
Our Take: Netflix pushes A Widow’s Game as “true crime,” which is technically true, and I’d assert that relatively thoughtful dramatizations of such events don’t ping our exploitation radar like so many true crime documentaries do. And this movie, while not groundbreaking or extraordinary on any front, presents a compelling narrative structure and de-soaps the soap operatics of the story enough to prompt us to ponder something more than its mediumweight salaciousness. It seems to be whacking a thematic pinata to see what falls out: What motivates people to apply disproportionately desperate measures to otherwise manageable situations? Bits of the human condition hit the ground – sex addiction, midlife crises, the need for control and mental illness are contemplated, perhaps. The film ultimately may be about the ever-elusive why of it all, the inexplicable mysteries of human behavior that show little logic or reason.
Some may find this lack of closure dissatisfactory and possibly unsettling, but open-ended themes are typically more intellectually provocative. Assuming that’s what A Widow’s Game is going for, although I’m not certain if Sedes has a clear goal in mind; the film often seems like it’s making inferences without quite knowing the object of the inferring. The triple-POV narrative cuts up the story into fragments that never fully bring the characters into focus. Details are sketchy: Is Maje’s behavior a reaction to the strict religious upbringing that’s briefly mentioned? Does Salva find his tidy domestic home life stultifying? What do two brief scenes of Eva trying to find a school for her special-needs daughter tell us about her as a mother and a detective? Ultimately, these characters fight to transcend their stereotypes: the manipulative strumpet, the weak-willed simp and the wily cop who can cut through their bullshit with intuition backed by evidence.
And yet the film is reasonably absorbing in a how-will-this-turn-out plot-driven sense, and its most compelling moments occur during the sharply honed procedural elements of Eva’s portion of the story. I occasionally wished the film stuck with her point-of-view, but you have to admire its attempt to deviate from the norm. It’s a highly watchable film with performances that are uniformly solid, if slightly hamstrung by the medium-shallow material. It’s a smallish saga of sex and death that compels audiences to press play, and offers just enough to keep them from walking away.
Our Call: A Widow’s Game is a slightly-better-than-middling drama, professionally executed from a technical standpoint but a bit thin of screenplay. So STREAM IT, even though it could use a tighter rewrite.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.