3 out of 5

Directed by: Oriol Paulo

I’ve never read a Harlan Coben book. But I have.

…Actually, even this quirky opener is a bit of a lie, but it’ll still prove the point I was going to make: my first Coben experience was the movie Tell No One, to which I took a then-girlfriend, thinking I was a cool kid and finding us an indie foreign flick (hey, I’m pretty sure it was playing at the Angelika?), only for her to recognize the ‘based on a Harlan Coben’ credit that appeared, and tell me she was a big Coben fan. One-upped! …But I also like to participate where I can, and I like the crime / thriller genre well enough, so I picked up a Coben book to try to join in on her fandom.

I can’t remember if I finished it; I do remember feeling like it was painfully generic. What isn’t a lie: I haven’t read anything else by Coben. But after seeing ninety different adaptations of his works – man, I totally have. In the same way that my brief sampling of Stephen King’s writing (at least from his major works) has combined with various movies to give me a sense of his writing style, Coben is that much more streamlined, allowing me to just kind of vibe out how his books work. All of the adaptations have been better or worse, and the ones with the least identity allow the Coben-shit to show through the most.

Which isn’t really shit, of course: it’s a primed formula. It works. I keep watching, and if I hadn’t a different sense of prioritization with books – perhaps I’d keep reading. But man, this stuff is a lot better when a director / writer / actors can zhush it up some. Otherwise, the Coben-shit can be eye-rollingly noxious.

So: from the outset of the Spanish adaptation of The Innocent, helmed almost completely by writer / director Oriol Paulo – definitely a creative with zhush – I was surprised by how un-Coben it all felt. A structural tic which has characters introducing themselves in first person is grabbing, but may be a book feature; however, the way Paulo loops through time quick and slow, back and forth, and generally has the actor stare into the camera at the completion of their monologue is really cinematic in a way these adaptations rarely are; Paulo was making the story feel like his own.

Mateo (Mario Casas), a young man about to enter the next stage of his life, is out celebrating, then chats up the wrong girl, and reluctantly winds up in a tussle outside of a club. One hasty shove later… and Mateo is imprisoned for the murder of another young man in the tussle. We quick cut through jailtime to Mateo emerging, and on the other side of trauma with his wife, Olivia (Aura Garrido), as they’re planning for their first child.

Some oddities stack up: Olivia takes a mysterious call; Mateo secretly meets with the mother of the boy he killed, and she calls him by the boy’s name. While this would fully qualify as Coben-shit in other takes on this material, Paulo’s handling of these sequences is calm; the unknown information is not necessarily the point (yet) – the focus is on character. So when Olivia goes on a sudden worktrip, then starts sending Mateo photos of herself with another man – and is oblivious to those photos when Mateo immediately calls her – this all hits harder, on a psychological level. It’s important we understand the puzzle, but because we want to get through this with Mateo – not just because it’s a puzzle.

Other characters are introduced – primarily detective Lorena Ortiz (Alexandra Jiménez) – surrounding the death of a nun. This death is connected back to Mateo in a wayward fashion, and different storylines begin to connect. What makes this work, beyond the grounded approach that’s been established, is a sense of patience: the tendency with these adaptations is to pile up the mysteries and have people react in increasingly illogical ways; here, as Mateo is scared of what he feels is his potential for violence, there’s always restraint in his responses, really engagingly handled by Casas.

Let me jump forward quite a bit: the conclusion works. All of the pieces are put into a place, and most of the emotional swings pay off, thanks to the initial slow build. But my jump has covered, like, four or five episodes. And therein two obnoxious things happen: firstly, Paulo loses control over the dammed-up Coben-tide, and once it comes pouring in, we have illogic aplenty. The pacing is still well handled, as-is the character work, but all the twisty-turny nonsense has to come out, and it “requires” people not asking questions and oopsy-doopsy looking the other way and etc. There’s a bit of subversion accomplished by kind of solving a big part of the mystery halfway through, but this is really just what signals the introduction of the heavier Coben-shit to come.

This would still be bettered by the very solid opening and closing, except for the other obnoxious thing: I guess no one gave Oriol the note that we don’t need to see women-in-danger to, like, feel something anymore, and slapping women around, similarly, isn’t required to get the menfolk all riled up. It’s ultimately a brief part of the runtime, but when it occurs, it’s way too focused on: there are several sequences of women getting beaten, and they are pointless. Pointless. I’m sure there’s some mental justification about how they get through it and are stronger and dot dot dot, but still – you can accomplish that without lingering on kicking someone in the face multiple times. Sigh.

I’ll let you put those pieces together to make the call. I do think the unique handling of Coben material, at least as the outset, is worth giving a shot, as it builds up quite a bit of good will. How much that’s ultimately squandered will be up to your tolerance. I’m likely focusing on the above too much, and so that’s “balanced” by my considering this is average overall, but I’ll admit that I felt I had enough of the mystery in place by the time these scenes occurred that I could’ve turn it off and been okay. The conclusion earns back some of the quality, but really only in that it makes me wish we could’ve seen a version of this without the indulgences.