Catalan Oriol Paulo has previously presented himself as a master of psychological thrillers. His “Body” (El Cuerpo) and especially “Invisible Guest” (Contratiempo) were masterfully conceived and directed thrillers, and after the weaker SF “Mirage”, Paulo returned to the genre in which he does best. “God’s Crooked Lines” or “Los renglones torcidos do Dios” was his most ambitious film so far and this thriller had six nominations in the Spanish film of the year. “God’s Crooked Lines” could also be described as Paul’s “Shutter Island” or “Shock Corridor”, and it is a stylized thriller in which Paulo modeled his aesthetic on the films of old Hollywood, mostly on the work of the incomparable Alfred Hitchcock.
The story takes place there in 1979, when private investigator Alice Gould (Barbara Lennie) will head to a closed insane asylum to investigate a suspicious death that occurred there a month or two earlier. Under mysterious circumstances, a young man whose father is a famous psychiatrist died there, and although his death was characterized as suicide, the old man hired Alicia to investigate what actually happened. And just as an aspiring journalist in Fuller’s iconic “Shock Corridor” faked mental illness to enter an insane asylum to investigate a murder and a text he’s convinced will win him a Pulitzer, Alicia will also feign insanity to infiltrate a madhouse and did the investigation. And she will do very well and all the psychiatrists are convinced that she really suffers from paranoia since she claims that her husband kidnapped her and put her inside in order to get hold of her money.
In parallel, we also follow the events of the death of the young man, and just as was the case with “Invisible Guest”, once again Paulo made a film in which nothing at all seems as it seems at first. It is a masterfully performed psychological thriller full of twists and turns and surprises in which Paulo once again complicated the situation to the point of pain, but once again showed that he really knows how to get out of the loops he designed. Stylistically, “God’s Crooked Lines” is quite different from everything that Paulo has previously recorded, and it is an extremely elegant, made-up film that exudes some old-fashioned flair, and although stylistically it owes the most to Alfred Hitchock’s thrillers, the story reminds a lot of Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”. .
It’s just that Paulo made the story even more complicated and risked a lot, because it could easily happen that everything here completely fell apart and turned into pure nonsense. It could also happen that the story becomes too obvious at first and that it is clear to us from the first what is actually happening, and although we have a handful of twists and surprises, nothing here seems excessive. This film only confirmed Paul’s status as perhaps the best Spanish genre filmmaker, and with “Good’s Crooked Lines” he showed that he has a lot of style, that he is very readable in film and that we can expect a lot more interesting things from him in the future.