A sly grin. A perplexed look. Cigarettes were lit to flesh out more building inquiries and confirm suspicions (or just because). What exactly is and isn’t true? God’s Crooked Lines is a Netflix Original based on the 1979 novel “Los renglones torcidos de Dios” by Torcuato Luca de Tena. It is directed by Oriol Paulo and written by Paulo, Guillem Clua, and Lara Sendim.
We immediately ground ourselves via a paved road route in a red Mustang behind our protagonist Alice Gould (Bárbara Lennie) and her driver traveling towards our main scene in the film, Our Lady the Fountain Hospital, after first peeping onto a gradual aerial sweep of lush evergreen mountain pines.
Alice is a private investigator hired to solve a killing that occurred at a psychiatric institution to which she intentionally commits herself, claiming paranoia as her condition to obtain admission.
The tale and premise are not unfamiliar right away, and they do not give subtlety to the genre. In 1979, Alice begins to doubt her sanity while undercover in the institution, enduring techniques, and viewpoints on mental health. In that aspect, I found the film wanting. However, it carried itself in how it opted to cinematically depict Alice’s rising mental issues.
The film’s actual driving force. The story serves as the foundation, but the focus is on how we question (or arrive at) reality and facts. I was able to finish it in two hours and thirty-four minutes because of this.
The film alternates between two timelines: the present, in which Alice is attempting to find the killer, and the circumstances leading up to the crime. This method advances the plot by having you piece together the case with Alice while creating your own questions. The use of some easily unnoticed audio tracking to signify Alice’s mental space in tandem with a shift in cinematic technique contributes to the sense of mystery and perplexity felt by all parties.
Much of what happens is told from Alice’s point of view, which actress Bárbara Lennie does admirably throughout the film. Dancing at the hospital between the private investigator and the patient in the issue. Loreto Mauleón (Montserrat Castell), Javier Beltrán (Dr. Cesar Arellano), and Eduardo Fernández (Samuel Alvar) are her co-stars who function as the major recurring operators in determining the status of all the patients dwelling at the hospital.
While the character development for these individuals is inadequate, their screen time contributes to the film’s overall emphasis. The three doctors also do a good job of conveying Alice’s many feelings and opinions about psychiatry in the late 1970s.
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The film’s finale was both rewarding and disappointing. It left me bewildered and in a minor spin, and I felt almost forced to watch it again. (No, I didn’t.) I’d like to go back in time and relive the times when I felt or thought a certain way. This execution sparks discussion and allows the audience to draw their own conclusions. From the start, God’s Crooked Lines is a film shrouded in mystery. What you believe you know is always debatable.
This picture suffers from a mix of duration and what felt like hurried character motives to advance the story. Even if you cut out many minutes, you can still get the same result.
I was starting to feel like Alice; I’d been in the psychiatric institution for far too long and I needed to get out. Perhaps this is part of the aim, for the spectator to experience the mental strain.
God’s Crooked Lines is now accessible only on Netflix.
