97 min | NR | February 28, 2020 | Magnolia Pictures
A disgraced Romanian cop flies to a Canary Island to learn a whistled language that lets criminals talk past wiretaps and informants. The money is hidden, the femme fatale has her own plan, and every conversation is a trap. The plot is a maze. The fun is watching it fold in on itself.
Cristi is a corrupt Bucharest police inspector who travels to La Gomera to learn Silbo, a whistled language the locals use to carry words across the island’s ravines. A crime syndicate adopts the whistles to move instructions past surveillance. Gilda, the woman who recruits Cristi, sells herself as a femme fatale and may be playing every man in the room. The film is a noir caper built around a single sharp idea. It is also a study of how surveillance turns every person into both watcher and suspect.
Vlad Ivanov plays Cristi as a man who has stopped expecting trust from anyone, including himself. He registers the strain of working three angles at once with stillness rather than panic. Catrinel Marlon plays Gilda as a performer who knows she is always on a screen somewhere. She delivers seduction as a transaction and never lets the mask drop long enough to confirm what is under it. Rodica Lazăr plays Magda, Cristi’s boss, with a cold procedural patience that makes her the most dangerous figure in a film full of liars.
Corneliu Porumboiu writes and directs with a structure that fractures the timeline into named chapters, each handing the point of view to a different player. The fragmentation forces the audience to assemble the scheme out of order, which mirrors the way the characters reconstruct each other’s lies. The whistled-language conceit pays off in the sound design, where human speech compresses into birdcalls that the film subtitles like dialogue. Porumboiu shoots the surveillance footage with the flat coldness of a security monitor and contrasts it against wide island vistas that promise an escape no one gets. He also salts the soundtrack with pointed needle drops that comment on the action with dry irony.
Porumboiu trades the long static takes of his earlier work for genre momentum, and the swap is a deliberate one. He uses noir as a delivery system for his recurring obsession with how language fails and how watching corrupts. The film is more interested in its puzzle than its people, and Cristi stays a cipher even when the plot demands he feel something. What the film does well it does cleanly. It builds a clever machine, runs it once, and trusts the click of the mechanism to be enough.