IMDb #138 Review: The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)

Source: Wikipedia

A retired Argentinian lawyer picks up the pen to write a novel about the case he considers "the crux of his life," an unsolved rape case.

For research, he visits the other crux of his life, a female coworker and source of decades of unresolved sexual tension. She gives him advice and encouragement and primary sources and a century-old Olivetti typewriter with a malfunctioning "A" key. Anything to help.

Flashback to 25 years ago, when the UST was new and fresh and people looked better without old-age makeup.

Young and peppy, the lawyer duo hunts the killer rapist by following a string of sparse evidence. The look in the eyes of a guy in a photo album; stalking the anonymous dude; breaking and entering and questionably obtaining private letters to his mama.

When their drinking buddy, a fútbol savant, interprets a code in the letters, it's more surprising than satisfying. Even more surprising, it works.

Vigilante justice is one thing; law office policy is another. The hardass judge wants none of their antics. And the suspect in custody considers whipping out his manhood for scrutiny a viable defense.

The wild card here is the bereaved widower. He allows the suspicious lawyers to thumb through his dead wife's photo album; he stakes out the train station for hours, scanning the crowd for his primary suspect. When he feels slighted by a miscarriage of justice, he takes up a gun to forcibly impregnate justice. Which ends as well as you'd imagine. Years later, still smoldering, he perpetuates the obligatory twist ending.

The real mystery isn't whodunit and how to catch the pendejo. It's how to procure a message about moving on from a bunch of people who clearly haven't moved on. (The answer: sexagenarian romance.)

Justice is just a word, but so are other important things, like love, time, pain, and jurisprudence.

129 minutes.