“She Walks in Darkness” takes a piece of recent Spanish history and turns it into a tense tale of espionage.
Writer-director Augustín Díaz Yanes tells a fictional story inspired by actual events: the terrorist acts of the Basque separatist group ETA, and the massive operation to try and stop them. Within this sprawling, decades-long struggle, we follow a young woman who goes undercover with the organization to try and expose them from the inside.
Susana Abaitua stars as Amaia, an agent in the Spanish Civil Guard who abandons her life for this mission. Abaitua faces the challenge of conveying who she is and what she’s thinking and feeling, while also remaining enigmatic to the people she’s investigating. Because of that, her role can seem frustratingly underwritten at times, but Abaitua finds enough nuance throughout to reveal compelling flickers of humanity.
Amaia’s assignment is to find ETA’s hidden stockpiles of weapons and explosives throughout the south of France. It’s the mid-1990s, and her handler (Andrés Gertrúdix) tells her the Civil Guard has never been able to pinpoint their location. She’ll have to get close to the higher-ups in the group, who’ve been doing this forever and are naturally suspicious of newcomers. Chief among them are Begoña (an intimidating Iraia Elias), a woman who has also sacrificed any notions of a secure family life for the cause, and the gruff Arrieta (Raúl Arévalo), who uses Amaia’s apartment as a base of operations and monitors her every move.
The spy craft Amaia uses to circumvent such scrutiny is often quite clever. A subtle switcheroo involving some garbage bags is fun and proves fruitful. And the communication method between Amaia and her team at the Civil Guard provides a lush mood to this otherwise understated effort: They message one another by playing ‘70s Italian pop songs back and forth, and the smooth, romantic melodies create a contrast with the danger we’re seeing on screen.
The brazenness of these ETA attacks is both understated and shocking. A gunman will simply walk up to a politician in broad daylight—on the street, in front of their home—and shoot them dead. Yanes’ film is a slow burn, and these quick bursts of violence are startling. He also intercuts real-life news footage of these crimes, which gives them both immediacy and heft.
But in time, Amaia has increasing difficulty protecting her cover. Having kept her own fiancé waiting for her for years, she begins to sympathize with Begoña for the distance she’s had to maintain from her children. Her look hardens, mirroring the woman she’s tasked with befriending, and the upbeat idealism of her earlier days steadily erodes as plans go awry and she sees things she can’t unsee. It’s all familiar spy-genre stuff, but it’s depicted in solid fashion.
Yanes achieves a lot of atmosphere through simple production design and near-constant rain. Symbolically, an apartment Amaia takes in Seville when she thinks she’s gotten out of this business for good is clean and white and spare—a contrast with her darkly moody abode in the Basque region on the opposite side of the country.
“She Walks in Darkness” can be a little confusing at times, and that’s probably intentional as we learn things alongside our conflicted heroine. But the fact that everyone believes what they’re doing is right is a notion that’s clear and complicated.
