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Spanish series Red Queen (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is a by-turns gloomy and clever adaptation of the first of a trilogy of dark thrillers written by author and journalist Juan Gomez-Jurado. Focusing on the spiky interplay between a disgraced detective and a superintelligent, mentally disturbed woman, it blends the stuff of cop procedurals, serial-killer thrillers and supernatural mysteries into a moderately provocative brew. And to be honest, it feels a little too familiar – but the debut episode might offer enough intrigue and complex characters to compel us to stick with it through seven gloomy-doomy episodes.
RED QUEEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A lengthy drone shot pans down from the wispy clouds on a sunny day to the Madrid skyline, then zooms in close to a city street, where a woman stands on a window ledge.
The Gist: Antonia (Vicky Luengo) is in a dark place. She leans out the window with the look on her face that tells us she’s thinking about jumping. Concurrently, cop Jon Gutierrez (Hovik Kuechkerian) enters the apartment building, finds Antonia’s name on a mailbox, and begins the sweaty and exhausting climb up many flights to her floor. He stops to rest and catch his breath, and we really, really don’t want him to, for obvious reasons. The camera pans from window to window in Antonia’s flat and we see different versions of her tying a noose, climbing into the tub with a razor blade, putting a gun in her mouth, dousing herself with gasoline, unsheathing a samurai sword to commit ritual seppuku – and then climbing onto the window sill and leaping. Smash cut to title sequence.
But! This was just, what? A fakeout? A vision? Weird third-person POVs into Antonia’s state of mind? She’s in fact very much still alive when Gutierrez finally gets there. She’s a step ahead of him at all times: She already knows someone known as Mentor sent him. “What have you done wrong?” she asks him, because she knows if he’s seeing her, he’s likely in a bind. And this is when we flash back two days, to a scene in which Gutierrez tells a sex worker that she shouldn’t have to put up with the pimp that’s beating her up. He plants heroin in his car – but it was a reverse sting. She and the pimp set him up, and now he’s up shit creek with his bosses.
So Gutierrez sits in a police interrogation room when this Mentor character (Alex Brendemuhl) kinda just emerges from the shadows. Mentor says he’ll get Gutierrez out of trouble if he finds and retrieves Antonia, who has a 242 IQ, making her the most intelligent person in the world. Then we jump back ahead to Antonia and Gutierrez. She allows herself to be talked into going with him. And so they go, to a subdivision of the incomprehensibly rich, to the home of a banker. Mentor greets them, but Antonia stays in the car and has freakout hallucinations of a vicious monkey attacking her. Mentor feeds her a pill and she calms down and they all go inside to take in a rather Cronenbergian scene: The banker’s adult son, frozen stiff, seated upright on a sofa, the top half of his head cleanly sliced off. Perhaps it goes without saying that he’s dead. And it sure seems like Antonia’s intelligence and mental illness are a contributing factor in her apparent superhuman abilities – it appears she may be the go-to psychic for a secret almost-maybe-sorta law-enforcement agency that exists to help the rich and powerful.
Speaking of filthy rich assholes, this whole time we’ve been cutting away to Carla Ortiz (Celia Freijeiro), a fashion designer who works for her father Ramon (Jose Angel Egido). They argue, because he’s shutting down the company just like someone who’s getting out while the getting’s good and not giving a rat’s tuckus if a buildingful of employees get laid off, and she wants to save the company. She calls her driver who takes her to a stable to pick up her beloved horse, so they can deliver it to a racetrack in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, when all the music cues tell us that’s probably not a smart time to be in this place, because who knows who might be out there, posing as a ranger who could help Carla when she gets lost, but in actuality, has more sinister plans for her? Oh jeez, I say. Oh jeez.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Several dozen gritty TV cop shows, conspiratorial thrillers and serial killer dramas (or combinations thereof) come to mind – The Killing, Mindhunter, The Blacklist, etc. – combined with the eyebrow-raising possible supernaturalisms of True Detective.
Our Take: And yet, despite that seen-it-before feeling, Red Queen gives us enough juicy characters and quick-wit dialogue to keep us engaged. In Gutierrez and Antonia, we get a pair of whip-smart, what’s-their-damage protagonists with compelling flaws, trading quips and, perhaps unwittingly, finding themselves in bizarre situations that might be life-altering. They’re classic Flawed Characters, one struggling to determine if she has a gift or a curse, the other exists in a moral gray area where he’s willing to break the rules to help people. (Do we sit down and watch prestige-y dramas like this expecting anything less? The mystery-of-the-week format is soooooo 1990s – or soooooo CW.)
The debut points less toward being a true groundbreaker, more toward being a honing of familiar formulas to a spiky point. It teases Antonia’s probably tragic past (she had a family; now her apartment is barren) and paints Gutierrez as an eccentric fella whose aging mother may be his only close confidant. The former, it seems, is trying to avoid being pulled back into secretive extralegal affairs – no character in the history of audio-visual art with a uni-moniker like Mentor ever heads up a pleasant sewing circle at the community center. The latter will likely have to use his considerable wit to keep from losing himself in an ethically foggy cabal created to benefit the upper-crusties. So: Interesting people, interesting setting, flashes of grisly gore – we may have a winner here.
Sex and Skin: None so far.
Parting Shot: The Moon, big and bright and full, hovers in the sky, peering between tree branches, coldly observing some pretty terrible shit happening. It does not intervene.
Sleeper Star: He’s not a by-strict-definition “sleeper star,” but the way Kuechkerian underplays the role of the Man Who’s Seen It All (Even Though He Obviously Hasn’t Seen It All) illustrates how Gutierrez will likely be the primary engine driving this series.
Most Pilot-y Line: Two pointed zingers aim to set the hook and make us wonder WTF is up with Antonia:
“You and I think. She does something else.” – Mentor
“Look, I’m not saying she’s not the reincarnation of Clarice Starling, but people might mistake her for one crazy bitch.” – Gutierrez
Our Call: Sometimes you can blend several of the same ol’ ingredients into something pretty tasty – and that, so far, is Red Queen’s M.O. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
