Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Recurrence’ on Netflix, the Third Generic Crime Thriller in the Argentinian ‘Pipa’ Series

Recurrence is the third movie in what Netflix calls the “Crimes of the South” collection, a series of gritty crime thrillers starring Luisana Lopilato as no-nonsense police detective Manuela “Pipa” Pelari. CRUCIAL CHRONOLOGY INVENTORY: 2018’s Perdida launched the franchise, followed by 2020’s Intuition, which is actually a prequel about Pipa’s rookie case. Recurrence, originally titled simply Pipa, picks up with our intrepid tough lady protag 10 years after she quit being a cop, but wouldn’t you know it, trouble always has a way of finding her, even way out in the desert.

RECURRENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The setting: the remote Quebrada region in the Andes in northern Argentina. It takes long, winding roads with many a hairpin turn to get to the crime scene. A teenage girl was burned to death, and there’s the body in the foreground, hideously scorched, because no detective story, TV or movie, is worth doodledy-squat without a closeup of a gut-churning dead body. Samantha Sosa (Laura Gonzalez) was hired help for a massive bash thrown by the Carreras family, the squillionaires who own this stinking town. There’s the matriarch, Etelvina (Ines Estevez), the ne’er-do-well son Cruz (Auiles Casabella) and daughter Mecha (Malena Narvay), who’s set to wed the mayor’s son, an act one could equate with the prince of Denmark or whatever marrying the princess of France or something, because it would consolidate political power and such. This will help fortify the control that lightskinned colonizers have over the land that originally belonged to indigenous folk like Samantha.

All of that is just color and context to pad the run time and provide a backdrop for the plot, in which Pipa (Lopilato) finds herself reluctantly dragged out of her quiet life of gardening and raising goats with her young son Tobias (Benjamin Del Cerro). Her auntie Alicia (Paulina Garcia) is an advocate for the downtrodden indigenous peoples, and encourages Pipa to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong. Sort of, anyway; Samantha was found on her land. And Alicia has good reason – Samantha’s death sure seems linked to the Carreras, who have the cops in their pockets, save for Rufino Jerez (Mauricio Paniagua), the forthright detective who will inevitably butt heads with the racist and corrupt penisbreaths on the force, including Capt. Mellino (Ariel Staltari).

So Pipa puts on her brooding, intense face and begins poking around. Meanwhile, a few subplots play out in front of us via haphazard editing: A cougar roams the land near Pipa’s property, a mayoral race heats up, the cops face a police-brutality controversy and Cruz and Mecha hint at a rather icky interpersonal sibling relationship. The first thing symbolizes stuff and things (if you want it to), the second and third things clutter the plot and make an argument for either A) chopping some of this shit out or B) this being a TV series, and the fourth thing illustrates the flagrant insularity and moral rot of the rich ruling class. Me, I’d rather spend some more time with Pipa, who seems to be the only person in this plot with any charisma, but this movie just keeps distracting itself, because there’s eyeroller melodrama to indulge, and it also has Something To Say, even if it’s kinda half-assed, as it stumbles awkwardly to a conclusion.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The smalltown dynamic and the wannabe dramatic score makes me think of a neutered and generic riff on Twin Peaks, if the story was led by a character in a pseudo-neo-Western who wouldv’e been played by Kevin Costner 20 years ago.

Performance Worth Watching: Someone please give Lopilato and her deep, soulful air a script that gives her more to do than the usual tough-lady cliches.

Memorable Dialogue: None. We are thirsty for something quotable here, but alas. The dialogue in Recurrence is purely procedural, boilerplate stuff grinded out sans a single verbal flourish, lest the plot cease moving forward for even a second.

Sex and Skin: One incredibly creepy sex scene with buttcheeks.

Our Take: Two years ago, I watched and reviewed Pipa prequel Intuition, a fact I failed to recall until after I sat through Recurrence in its entirety. With apologies to Lopilato’s toughness and sincerity, this is an indictment of Intuition, which I called “baseline competent,” apparently a generous assertion. The same criticisms apply to Recurrence, which is quite similarly unmemorable and like so many TV and movie crime-drama-thrillers before it. It is in fact evaporating from my mind at this very moment, as if it were the lightest spritz of mist upon my skin in the arid fry of the Patagonian.

Two components of the movie stand out: One, Lopilato’s performance. She cultivates some chemistry with the similarly earnest Paniagua’s cop character, hinting at a thoughtful relationship and potential romance; too bad the movie’s frustratingly indifferent to it. It’d just get in the way of the cluttered plot, with its generic detective-isms, corrupt-cop cliches and no-duh political statements (hey guess what, rich people are crappy when they exploit and suppress indigenous folk!). And two, the musical score, which is too prominent in the sound mix, and is unintentionally hilarious in the way it sounds like a detective-thriller parody that you’d see on The Simpsons. You can just picture the soundtrack editors trying to punch up this movie by nudging the fader up, and up, and up again, until the dramatic swells and elbow-on-the-synth jolts threaten to drown out the dialogue. Such are the meager joys of this movie.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I’m also at a loss as to what exactly is recurring here – besides this franchise’s dogged adherence to banality.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Recurrence on Netflix