In Netflix’s The Snow Girl, it’s urgent to solve a crime. One with no clear clues, beyond a yellow raincoat on the ground and a crowd of witnesses who don’t remember clues. But the script doesn’t take the easy path of narrating a complicated investigation between police officers, desks and unsubstantiated deductions. This is a story of realistic characters, dealing as best they can with pain and frustration. The mystery is the center of the story, but also the invisible threads that unite those involved. The best point of the adaptation of Javier Castillo’s novel of the same name is that he is aware that the answer to his enigma is to find a lost girl who could die for the slightest mistake.
The production knows that its strong point is to summarize and focus all its efforts on that possibility. What makes the production not deviate from its objective: to unravel what surrounds the crime. At the same time, that each clue -real or deceptive- is something more than a cliché or a common place. All the effort of the script is in that possible answer. A brilliant decision, particularly when the plot recounts, for the umpteenth time, a mysterious disappearance that apparently has no plausible explanation.
But it is evident that the writers, Jesús Mesas Silva and Javier Andrés Roig, link the suspense in different shades. The most important, the police version, in which Inspector Millán (Aixa Villagrán) dedicates time and effort to a routine investigation. The snow girl hints that, perhaps, the first problem to overcome is her old nose. After all, how can she know that the case at hand fits all of her vast experience in identical situations? What will she allow him to discover what makes him different from anyone else?
the snow girl
The snow girl uses the urge to know the truth, a device to keep the narrative moving quickly and smoothly. Specifically, when she must deal with the fact that it is an adaptation of a best-selling novel whose resolution is familiar to most viewers. How to provide a new air to such a premise? The plot, then, uses the best of the original material to create a vision about an imperious search for the truth. A veteran journalist knows that Amaya’s case is more complex than a lost girl. The question of whether the victim will survive her disappearance is constant.
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Score: 4 out of 5.
The snow girl hides a more complicated mystery
But the legal method is necessary and repetitive. It is precisely the connection with the ordinary that makes Amaya’s case complicated. The snow girl poses it as an apparently common event, but as it deepens, she shows that she is not at all. Which allows it to be explored from various facets. From the simplicity of the only footprint of the lost little girl, to the evidence that what happened hides a worse event.
The snow girl uses the urge to know the truth as a device to keep the narrative moving quickly and smoothly. Specifically, when she must deal with the fact that this is an adaptation of a best-selling novel whose resolution is familiar to most viewers.
How to provide a new air to such a premise? The plot, then, uses the best of the original material to create a vision about an imperious search for answers. Eduardo (José Coronado), a veteran journalist, knows that Amaya’s case is more complex than a lost girl. At the same time, that this connection with what could be an imminent tragedy requires his maximum effort. The question of whether the victim will survive her disappearance is constant.
The journey in search of the truth
A mystery that, at first, is based on a fight against the clock through clues that lead nowhere. Much less solid enough to be more than small signs of a murky circumstance at the bottom of the case. The snow girl has the particularity of being an enigma within another. Soon, the script makes it clear that, despite efforts to find Amaya, the truth of her whereabouts is a piece of something more tragic.
Gradually, the series builds what seems like its way into seedy places. The event begins to torment Inspector Millán in a well-constructed narrative turn that reflects on sensitivity over cynicism. She knows that a missing girl is a statistic. For her, it is a face.
But this is the point of view of an official. In the institution to which he belongs, it is a crime among the countless that occur daily. The character’s pain is the symbol of years of failure to see identical bloody scenarios. “She won’t be the last girl to go missing,” he complains quietly. “The next one will make us forget Amaya.”
All roads in The Snow Girl lead to a tragic response.
As time passes, the case fades and disappears from the present. It is then that it becomes an obsession for Millán, the parents of Amaya and Eduardo. The argument is not limited to delving into the suffering of a crime that impacts a family.
At the same time, it creates the sensation of shock wave through all those who are related to the case. Little by little, the silence surrounding the fate of a victim in unforeseeable circumstances becomes deafening.
Like the book, the adaptation carefully depicts a crime scene leading up to a more twisted episode. At the same time, the family catastrophe that symbolizes what happened with Amaya for all involved. One neat point of the script is to give the subplots consistent relevance. That, despite the fact that all the attention of the plot is in finding the lost girl. However, the possibility that there will never be answers is constant.
Fight even when all seems lost
Perhaps for this reason, Eduardo needs Miren (Milena Smith), younger and with the idealism of a journalist still in training. The collaboration between the trio is undoubtedly one of the strong points of the production.
Together they will go through the investigation from a new perspective. From the experience and sagacity of journalists to the intuition of the police. What happened with Amaya becomes a kind of large-scale riddle. Each one, from their space and point of view, will explore the case in fragments of information that must be completed.
For the last chapter of The Snow Girl, in which the answer to the question of Amaya’s whereabouts arrives, the series reaches its hardest point. Also, the most dramatic and best narrated. One of the great virtues of The Snow Girl is to be able to build a credible and emotional ending. There are no half measures in this painful story that uses the clichés of suspense to tell a premise that is based on being believable. Perhaps his greatest virtue.