Everybody Knows

For me, this film was slightly mismarketed (as a thriller, with the nature of the criminal act in question provided in the publicity) – and if you’re looking for a thriller, this … isn’t really that kind of thrilling. It’s more of a melodrama, as a family gathers for a wedding, an incident occurs, and secrets from the past intrude into the present. There’s some nice performances here (Javier Barden and Penelope Cruz, married in real life, play two friends who are both married to other people and have a comfortable friendly chemistry that treats them as two people who share a past but not necessarily a future), but for me it rarely gets out of second gear in meandering its way to an ending (in particular, the opening wedding sequence kinda just keeps going on and on and there are a lot of red herrings that never really pay off into anything). This all feels very arthouse-by-numbers – nothing really There just isn’t a lot of urgency or, well, thrills. I’ve been told if you go in cold to this, it can be appreciated as more of a drama but that wasn’t what I was expecting and as drama there wasn’t anything so transcendent that it overlooked the lack of proper thrillingness.