The Marked Woman: Yet Another Grizzled Detective Movie

Netflix’s new mystery thriller, The Marked Woman (released originally as La Desconocida), is confusing. More critically, though, it commits the worst mistake a movie can make: it’s boring. From Spanish director Gabe Ibáñez, the film squanders its premise at every turn, fills the story with unlikeable characters, and lacks emotional payoff.

The film opens on a woman named Lucia (Kira Miró), who we come to find is a confidential informant in a human trafficking ring that has been coerced into accusing her supervising officer, Quique Zárate (Pol López), of corruption. Lucia is manhandled away and taken to a bus station, where she sneaks off to the bathroom and hands a woman (Ana Rujas) a piece of paper under the stall. We cut to three months later – that unnamed woman from the stall is discovered chained up and tortured in a storage container. She has no memory of who she is or what has happened to her.

After this, the rest of the movie collapses into gritty detective tropes, where we follow disheveled detective Anna Ripoll (Candela Peña ), who finally gets her boss to let her back on the job. You see, she’s disheveled because she’s been grieving after her brother recently jumped off a balcony. Of course, no one else wants the case of the missing woman, so it lands on Anna’s desk. The rest of the movie largely focuses on Anna’s rogue investigation of the mysterious victim in the shipping container, shown through disjointed, tropey scenes of a classic troubled detective: Anna’s boss tells her she’s working too hard, she bows her head in exhaustion and pops a mysterious pill, she looks wistfully at a mirror and sees visions of her dead brother, she perseverates over his last unplayed audio message from before he died.

And of course, Anna is quickly saddled with a chauvinistic maverick detective, Zarate, who reveals that he’s the agent whom Lucia was coerced into accusing, and he’s going to force the truth out of the woman from the shipping container to prove his innocence and save Lucia.

The rest of the movie focuses on Anna and Zarate’s investigation into the woman’s potential kidnappers, punctuated with stunning lapses of procedure that puncture the already thin realism of the film. The victim is left for days in the hospital without police protection, inviting an attacker whom she fights off like an expert martial artist. Anna leaves her in the car while she and another cop follow a suspect to try to get DNA off his dropped cigarette, and, at the climax of the movie, Anna takes her back to the shipyard where she was found to uncover a new shipment of trafficking victims.

As the movie ends, it lacks emotional payoff in multiple ways. Firstly, Zarate’s boss (Manolo Solo) reveals he’s been in on the scheme from the start, and it was he who killed Lucia, who, by the way, is the sister of the woman in the shipping container (her name is revealed to be Clara). Furthermore, the premise of the movie, a film about a woman found in a shipping container with no memory, is conveniently discarded at every turn. Clara quickly gains critical memories when it is convenient, and it is these sudden revelations rather than detective work that move the plot along, which removes the stakes from the film. 

While The Marked Woman is only an average action film, it should be noted that it is also a rare action film with a star in her 50s. Though the film and the character are cliched beyond belief, it’s rare that a middle-aged woman gets to be a grizzled detective at all. While it may not be an Oscar winner, The Marked Woman is sure to be a serviceable escapist action film for fans of thrillers and foreign films alike.