The Body

If you watched films on the beach instead of reading books this would fill the bucket nicely. In a style of a vengeful Inspector Columbo it will keep you juggling the outcomes right to the very end, as the sands begin to fade so to speak.

Mystery , intrigue about bizarre facts happen in a morgue .The same team - actress (Belen Rueda) , producer (Mikel Lejarza , Mar Targarona) , screenwriter (Oriol Paulo) , cameraman (Oscar Faura)- who made ¨The orphanage¨ and ¨The Julia's eyes¨ bring us another suspenseful film , ¨ The body¨ or ¨El Cuerpo¨ . The picture is thrilling and some moment brilliant , and the actors are quite reliable as Jose Coronado and Hugo Silva . And again a wonderful Belen Rueda as a nasty woman in a movie with intense sequences of tension and suspense . It deals with a veteran detective called Jaime Peña (Jose Coronado) searches for the body of a femme fatale (Belen Rueda is sensational in one of her best films along with ¨El Orfanato¨) which has gone missing from a morgue . As main suspect there appears her husband Alex Ulloa (Hugo Silva) . Alex is detained and finding alone in the morgue , he is terrorized by strange events , surrounded by corpses and then weird deeds take place .

The film contains tension , thriller , drama , mystery , plot twists and shocks , including decent scares with tense sequences especially in its final part , in a unexpected denouement , near of the end . Hitchcock-style psychological thriller , being surprisingly good and compellingly realized . The original as well as entertaining idea is overspread throughout the movie , but not totally satisfactory , including conventional pitfalls . The main cast is frankly fine , such as José Coronado as Inspector Jaime Peña who bears a dark past , Hugo Silva as upsetting Álex Ulloa , Belén Rueda as Mayka Villaverde , a selfish and domineering woman and the young lover Aura Garrido as Carla . The motion picture is pretty well , although sometimes stagy and packs excessive turns ; however is entertaining for continuous suspense . Sinister and mysterious atmosphere plenty of lights and shades , it is finely photographed by cameraman Oscar Faura . Suspenseful and stirring musical score by Sergio Moure who previously composed successful films as ¨Unconscious¨ and being expert on frightening atmosphere such as ¨Thesis on a Homicide" and ¨Kidnapped¨ .

The film was well produced by various producers , such as Joaquin Padro , Mar Targarona and Mercedes Gamero ; all of them have produced a lot of successes in the new Spanish cinema . Being professionally written and directed by Oriol Paulo who formerly realized only short movies and wrote ¨The Julia's eyes¨ . The movie will appeal to suspense enthusiasts and Belen Rueda fans . Rating : Good , better than average . It's well worth watching and contains some really thrilling scenes and disturbing images .

THE BODY (EL CUERPO) is one of those thrillers that grips you at the beginning and never lets go till the very end. The plot is straightforward: Álex Ulloa (Hugo Silva) has suffered a sudden bereavement, as his wife Mayka (Belén Rueda) has died of a heart attack. The corpse has been taken to the morgue without a postmortem, but has mysteriously disappeared. The morgue security- guard Torres (Miquel Gelabert) has been scared out of his wits - so much so that he runs out of the building and is knocked down by a car. Inspector Jaime Peña (José Coronado) investigates the crime, but finds the task difficult as he is still plagued by the memory of his wife's death a decade earlier in a hit-and-run accident. Sometimes his emotions get the better of him.

Set largely in and around the morgue, Oriol Paulo's film is a masterpiece of modern film noir, complete with dark shadows, long tracking shots down corridors, and point-of-view shots where we share the protagonists' uncertainties about what is going on. To complicate the plot still further, he introduces flashbacks into the past lives of Jamie and Álex, to show how the past exerts an almost paralyzing influence over the present.

The action takes place one dark night, where the rain pours down outside, confining all the characters to the claustrophobic space of the morgue. Within that space, Jaime apparently tries his best to tease out the truth of the crime, but Álex keeps resisting him. On the other hand, Álex tries to communicate with his girlfriend Carla (Aura Garrido), in an attempt to elope with her, but finds his endeavors continually frustrated by circumstances. Neither he nor Jaime can apparently obtain what they want. In this disordered environment, the logic of cause and effect has been deliberately disrupted.

As the action unfolds, so director Paulo further complicates the action by introducing sequence that represent projections of the protagonists' imagination; in other words, putting their assumptions on screen. This further complicates our comprehension of the plot; we have no idea how to separate 'truth' from 'fiction'. This confusion makes the dénouement all the more shocking.

Brilliantly performed, with Coronado giving a quite outstanding performance as the guilt-ridden inspector, THE BODY deserves to be considered a modern classic.

Congratulations to Spanish cinema by presenting us with yet another thriller / mystery spectacular without showing explicit sex, as we have seen in some Spanish films. The movie is great! The way that every thriller should be: it leaves you lost, but arrives somewhere. And this place is beyond the obvious. The atmosphere of suspense and tension remains, and we are honored by the environment's main plot: nothing less than a morgue! The unwinding of the film is fantastic, amazing and high quality. The Spanish film hardly disappoints me. This one does not disappoint at any time. We watch unblinking eyes and is surprised as the quality of the excellent climate of suspense. The final part is amazing, leaves us with an open mouth and makes us wonder as was thought up this great script. Without blinking my grade is 10! Never has a movie surprised me as much as this in recent years.

Thanks again Spanish cinema!

I thought the Spanish movie "La cara oculta - The Hidden Face" was the best mystery/thriller I had seen ever. But here comes - El cuerpo - The Body. Mystery and Thrill - from start to finish. Not much to comment on the plot. A body from the morgue goes missing and a detective is onto it . That is the story. Plenty of undetectable twists .The mother of all twists is the last scene. That hits one after another and on the face. Enjoyed this thoroughly. Very good background music score. Very good photography and cinematography. Very good screen play. A buffet of treat.Thanks to you guys "Oriol Paulo and Lara Sendim" - Muchas gracias ! My rating is 9/10.