A sexless and excessively tidy family mystery
Cannes Film Festival Everybody Knows Cert TBC, 132 mins
★★★★★
Dir Asghar Farhadi
Starring Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Ricardo Darín, Carla Campra, Eduard Fernández, Bárbara Lennie, Inma Cuesta
If you are in the mood to watch a middle-aged man in need of a haircut trying to solve a mystery muddied by race, class and family ties, Asghar Farhadi has you covered. The Iranian director has made it something of a hyper-specific stock-in-trade.
Everybody Knows, opening the 71st Cannes Film Festival, is an ensemble whodunit that begins with the final preparations for a wedding in a village near Madrid. Laura (Cruz), the sister of the bride, arrives with her children: husband Alejandro (Darín) couldn’t make it for reasons that are deliberately left vague. And it isn’t long before she is reunited with old flame Paco (Bardem).
The film begins by bombarding you with snatches of backstory and only stops with the kidnapping of Laura’s daughter Irene (Campra). Paco takes it on himself to investigate, seeking advice from a detective friend (Fernández), who believes Irene was targeted by someone close. In short, anyone could be a suspect.
Farhadi’s screenplay does an artful job of keeping vital fragments of each of its characters secret until the end. But characters synopsise grievances so often, and so thoroughly, that many pivotal scenes have the corny texture of a “previously, on last week’s show” reel.
This is a more complex take on the disappearing girl premise, but it’s sexless and excessively tidy, and invites no further reflection once its mystery is tied up. You watch Cruz and Bardem for chemistry, but this feels like maths.