While we're still pretending thatTrue Detectiveseason 2 didn't happen (and now that season 1 director Cary Fukunaga has moved on to films about child soldiers in Africa), we have Alberto Rodríguez's thrillerMarshland to satisfy our yearning for moody detectives investigating a disturbing case that shakes their faith in humanity. Set in a 1980 Andalusia still licking its wounds from the Franco regime — which was even worse thanTrue Detectiveseason 2, if you can imagine that — the picture follows detectives Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) and Pedro (Raúl Arévalo) as they look into the disappearance of teenage sisters Estrella and Carmen. They don't quite have a Rust-Marty dynamic, and their philosophies about the mistake of human consciousness are implied rather than spoken. But as the older, brutal Juan and the younger, level-headed Pedro clash — particularly as Pedro begins to suspect that Juan did some very bad things under Franco — the picture does bring to mind True Detective, complete with symbolic antlers. That it also evokes other detective stories is not a demerit; that's what makes a genre a genre, and the gorgeously shotMarshlanddoes what it does very well, with a spin unique to its time and place. And best of all, no Vince Vaughn.
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