The Spanish thriller Infiesto (now on Netflix) combines two terrible tastes that taste terrible together – Covid and serial killers. So it’s no surprise to learn that this is a bleak excursion into the hoary depths of human existential hell, explored by two cops who bend the dickens out of the rules but always bring home the bad guy. Except this time, it’s harder because, you know, Covid. Will that added wrinkle breathe some life into a stolid genre? Let’s find out.
INFIESTO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: A teenage girl wanders into a town square. She’s gaunt. Pale. Sickly. A ragged dress hanging off her. Sores around her wrists and ankles. A straw doll tied to one hand. The cops pull up. She screams. Subtitle: FIRST DAY OF LOCKDOWN, accompanied by the sound of a very large and heavy steel door slamming shut WHAUMMM. Samuel Garcia (Isak Ferriz) is a cop. Detective. Black shoes, black pants, black jacket, black hair peppered with grey. His partner is Marta Castro (Iria del Rio), black shoes, black pants, black jacket, black hair. His mother is in a nursing home and he can’t visit her. Her boyfriend is symptomatic and isolating in a bedroom. It’s raining buckets. Grim. Grim.
Garcia and Castro are on the case of What’s Up With the Gaunt Girl. She was missing for three months, a presumed abduction. All the other cops are tied up enforcing lockdown curfews, the boss says, so they’re on their own, except when the plot sez they need backup or whatever. WHAUMMM, SECOND DAY OF LOCKDOWN. They talk to the girl’s mother in the hospital, go check out one place in tiny Infiesto, a mining town, and then another. There’s this guy, known as Dog Killer. That’s what they call him: Dog Killer. We meet him. Real piece of work, this Dog Killer. Imagine what a creep who kills dogs in a movie and is named Dog Killer looks like and where he lives, and you’ll be right on.
Shit happens with Dog Killer, but let’s not get into it. Spoilers. WHAUMMM, THIRD DAY OF LOCKDOWN. Garcia and Castro rampage through a likely crime scene without wearing gloves or caring where they step or showing any sense, really, and uncover a clue leading to a guy known as Demon. That’s what they call him: Demon. Our cops visit Demon’s alleged trailer and rampage around senselessly because time is of the essence and the trailer blows up. Don’t worry, they survive to rampage through the smoking ruins despite it being a likely crime scene. Their careless-ass detecting seems to work though, because they always find the perfect clue to further unravel the mystery of Who Kidnapped the Gaunt Girl, and also, it turns out, Several Other Teens in a Ritualistic Pattern Of Some Sort. We meet Demon – even bigger piece of work than Dog Killer, but man, we haven’t met The Prophet yet. The Prophet! The only thing that’s worse than dog killers and demons is someone who claims to have a direct line to a deity. Meanwhile, WHAUMMM, FOURTH DAY OF LOCKDOWN. Covid keeps happening. Spoiler alert: Covid happens for a while.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Infiesto is one of the puddles in an alley in Seven and one of the Evil Twig set pieces from True Detective crossed with a Covid movie like, well, not Alone Together or Locked Down, but maybe Safer at Home or Songbird.
Performance Worth Watching: I’m not saying the performance is particularly good, but the guy who plays Demon, Jose Manuel Poga, really gnashes up the scenery, and he’s more worthy of your attention than anyone else in this derivative and ridiculous movie.
Memorable Dialogue: Castro and Garcia stare at – here it comes – a wall full of news clippings and photos and maps with pins in it:
Castro: How can people be so… (trails off)
Garcia: We’ll catch him.
Sex and Skin: None. NOBODY had sex during Covid lockdown.
Our Take: I was less concerned about Covid here than black mold, since Castro and Garcia’s investigation takes them on a tour of the most depressing sites of Northern Spain. It’s just one grungy abandoned forgotten damp gray ugly dim-lit scumdump after another. They’ve gotta be breathing in so many spores, man. There’s a scene in which their boss urges them to wear surgical masks because of Covid, and one wonders if they’d help keep toxic microfungus outta their lungs.
But I digress, from Infiesto’s cavalcade of serial-killer-thriller cliches. There’s no narrative rock here that hasn’t been turned over by dozens of other similar films. It staples the usual ritual-murder depravity to the existential dread of early-days Covid, and there’s nary a ray of hope to be found here – it’s just death, death, death. Except death is rarely so boring, or couched within such a ramshackle quasi-procedural populated with characters so thin, they make cardboard cutouts look like, I dunno, sperm whales? Sperm whales are pretty thick.
The filmmakers do manage to concoct a plot device to link the oppressive atmosphere of ritual torture and murder with the oppressive atmosphere of Covid, and no, it’s not the staple holding the screenplay together. And sorry, I won’t reveal it, less because it’s a spoiler, more because it’s so simplistic and half-assed, I’m too embarrassed to type it. At least the film clips along at a decent pace, so we have fewer opportunities to fall into the sticky tarpit of its illogic, and so it doesn’t have to weigh itself down with a single, compelling, well-considered storytelling detail, or at least one that hasn’t been rendered threadbare by countless other films that preceded it. Bad movie!
Our Call: Hey, Infiesto – time to turn in your gun and badge. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
