Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City’ on Netflix, a Preposterous Spanish Serial-Killer Thriller

Deep breath: Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City (exhale) is a new Spanish serial-killer thriller on Netflix, and any serial-killer thriller with the word “silence” in the title is in trouble, and just asking for it. “It” being comparison to movies with eight-word titles, one of which is “silence.” Or maybe just that one movie where we all learned about the exquisite culinary pairing of fava beans and chianti (insert slurpy chittery sucking-spittle-through-clenched-teeth noises here). Anyway, is this thing worth 110 minutes of your life, or should you be using your mom’s eyebrow tweezers to pluck gravel from the grooves of the tires on your Pontiac Vibe instead? Lucky for you, we’re here to help you answer that question.

TWIN MURDERS: THE SILENCE OF THE WHITE CITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Unai (Javier Ray) is back to work after an extended layoff, and isn’t bankrupt from not working because he lives in Spain, where you get family leave and humane stuff like that, and not America, where nobody cares if you suffer. Coincidentally, on his first day back as a detective slash serial killer profiler, a new serial killer strikes, but with the same M.O. as the old serial killer Unai tossed in jail 20 years ago: two bodies, one male and one female, exquisitely arranged and decorated with floral things shaped like suns and placed over their general genital regions. It’s a good reason to visit the old killer, Ignacio (Alex Brendemuhl), who, this being Spain, is just about to complete his prison sentence and go free, where maybe he’ll get to hang out with his twin brother who turned him in. He’s a jerk to Unai, and he doesn’t even give him any new recipes.

Unai and his partner Estibaliz (Aura Garrido) get to work looking for clues to these overly elaborate murders that only happen in movies that are Preposterous Thrillers. The plot includes bees, tattoos, ancient art, folklore, ritual whatnot, twins, creepy things made out of twigs, opticians with prized collections of vertebrate eyeballs on display, BEES and all manner of red herringbones for our protagonists to choke on. They’re under the supervision of Alba (Belen Rueda), who recently transferred to the force, and likes to jog the same city routes as Unai; there’s some consensual eyebrow-raising happening between them, which seems complicated since they work together and she’s married and he’s a recent widower.

Anyway, did I mention we already got a glimpse of the killer, who has a sinister Saw laboratory where he straps his victims to tables and straps tubes full of BEES to their mouths so the BEES fly around inside them and sting them to death? Well, the movie opens with that scene, and it’s one hell of a scene, I tell you what. The killer just keeps on killing people and arranging the bodies like grim versions of your grandma’s garden-tea-party place settings, and Unai broods and deals with loss, and the previous killer is about to get out, and he and Alba schtup in a very uncomfortable place, and the new killer keeps sending him photos, and Estibaliz’s brother gets involved, and they get way too emotionally involved with the case, and it all comes to a pretty stupid-ass head.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pour one-third portion of Seven and one-third portion of True Detective and one-third portion of the movie with “silence” in the title in a blender; eviscerate into a bland paste; pour into a glass; serve with a silly straw.

Performance Worth Watching: If only we could see our own eyeballs, because it would be pretty entertaining to watch them roll right out of our skull holes while Twin Murders flickers moronically in front of us.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’ll need your badges and service weapons, detectives.” WE KNEW IT WAS COMING, DIDN’T WE.

Sex and Skin: Lots of naked dead bodies. And a couple of overly stylized sex scenes in which we see a fair amount of Ms. Rueda.

Our Take: Twin Murders features a few sequences in which characters chase each other through byzantine structures, up and down stairs and across roofs and out windows and all that, and it’s quite the metaphor for this overly complicated plot. And yet, despite all the ins and outs and what-have-yous, it’s all very predictably twisty and never transcends boilerplate moody-detective life-is-hell humans-are-garbage crapola. We’ve seen it all dozens of times, and we probably only needed to see it like three or four times (see the aforementioned movies-it-will-remind-you-of, and add Zodiac).

You could say that the film is lean and mean and features no wasted scenes, because each scene exists to introduce a plot point that moves the film along to the next scene. And here, I need to retract my previous use of the word “characters,” because each one is a collection of plot points at the absolute mercy of the Plot God, who makes these non-people suffer and have mostly joyless sex like one might imagine Wednesday Addams might do if she was forced to play with Barbie dolls. I will say Daniel Calparsoro directs the hell out of this thing, giving it some visual panache, which is akin to building a ’63 Corvette body around a hamster wheel. Which is just a silly way of saying this movie doesn’t work, and is dumb as heck.

Our Call: SKIP IT, unless you’re programming your Unintentional Laughs Film Festival.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City on Netflix