2 out of 5

Directed by: Gabe Ibáñez

Despite some Taken-esque editing in an early fight sequence, I settled quickly into The Marked Woman’s 80s / 90s style of mystery / thriller: a big-screen swing of a smaller scoped story; something that you were likely to have missed in theaters as a kind of sleeper good film but caught later – and championed – on late nite TV.

While there are many criticisms to make regarding how streaming has affected our viewing habits [in the year 2026, when this is being authored], I do think it’s allowed for movies of this type to get more exposure again, and sometimes the secret maths of the algorithms / wishes of whoever’s paying for placement pushes one of those my way; so I pushed the go button on The Marked Woman, and settled in for some steady-state satisfaction.

…Alongside a lot of those sleeper good films were plenty of not-so-great ones, of course, and while director Gabe Ibáñez’s and writer Lara Sendim’s film is not the worst, some elements that seem kind of subversive for this “person with amnesia is a trained killer!” setup turn out to not be subversive, and it’s moreso that there’s just not much going on. Even had this been boiled down to a television episode, you’d end up feeling like it’s a little underbaked.

Candela Peña plays Anna Ripoll, a cop fresh back from leave – after a personal tragedy – that Peña gives a kind of irate but compelling energy. She is odd couple paired with Zárate, played by Pol López, who is equally irate but leans towards irascible, and ‘gets shit done’ by not paying attention to the pesky rules that Ripoll likes. They are both tasked with (solving the mystery of) ‘the marked woman,’ played by Ana Rujas, who was discovered chained up in a shipping container, having been tortured to a point of her having near complete amnesia. …Except when she needs to kick some ass! Who is this Marked Woman?

We’re strung along with some compelling procedural work, mostly by Ripoll, but it’s of course primarily helped along by little drips and drabs of amnesia-lady’s memory coming back. Also: I put “solving the mystery of” in parenthesis before because it’s never… quite clear what these cops are actually investigating? And, like, I guess witness protection in Barcelona is just walking your charge out in public and to a motel without locked doors? Also, when you’re a rule-abiding cop, it makes a lot of sense to take frequent smoke or water breaks and not pay attention to what’s going on a few feet away.

The really slimy, sweaty cinematography by Bernat Bosch is interesting – I appreciate how unflattering it allows the characters to be (sincerely – even model Rujas is allowed to look relatively (I mean, she is a model) grody at points); the shooting style is mostly practical; both Peña and López bring a lot of character to their roles, but it’s not much supported by the script. To which: it’s effective at at least distracting us with the Why of the mystery up to a point, but once we kind of figure out the gist, it’s spoilery much ado about not much, and you end up waiting for another shoe to drop that… never does.