The Secret in Their Eyes Movie Review: Love Comes in many Forms, but the Eyes Hold the Secret

It’s somewhat crucial to understanding The Secret in Their Eyes to know that the original Spanish title, El secreto de sus ojos simultaneously conveys the sense of ‘their eyes’ and ‘his eyes’. The English title is the best possible choice because superficially the original refers to several characters, but we are also meant to take it to refer to three separate individuals and their own private unrequited love.

First and foremost is Gómez (Javier Godino), the prime suspect in the brutal rape and murder of Liliana Colotto. The investigator working the case first spots him in a class photograph of the victim in which Gómez is looking directly at her. Second is Benjamín Esposito (famed Argentine actor Ricardo Darín), the investigator, now retired, looking back on the case twenty-five years after the fact. He is trying to write a novel based on the gruesome crime and in so doing he reconnects with Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil), his former boss in the Justice Department. As Benjamín and Irene look through old photos, we see a similar look from Benjamín toward Irene.


In the cases of these two men, the secret of their love for a woman is revealed by their eyes. However, the driving force of love in the film, and the eyes that truly matter, are those of Morales, the husband of the murdered woman. He wants justice for his wife’s death. He claims he would rather see the killer spend a lifetime in prison than quietly go to sleep forever by a death penalty injection. Morales spends his afternoons waiting in train stations, hoping to spot Gómez. When Benjamín runs into him one day (long after the case has been officially closed), he sees the love in Morales’s eyes. In those eyes he recognizes a passion that will not die and is spurred to reopen the case.

Through these three principal male leads we see three different types of, approaches toward and ways of coping with unrequited love. Gómez has held a long-term love from a distance of Liliana and allows his passion to morph into a sick twisted version of love that brings him to commit an unspeakable crime. Benjamín also loves from a distance, not so much physical as a self-imposed class distance. He thinks of Irene as unattainable, better than he is for coming from money and having been educated in the Ivy League. There’s also the fact that she is his superior and recently engaged. His is a passionate love unlike the lustful love of Gómez for Liliana. Ah, but Morales’s love for his dead wife. This is love at its truest. It is the love Benjamín aspires to, but fails to achieve. It is a love that inspires Benjamín first to investigate further until justice is done and then to commit his final act before the credits roll.

The film was directed by Juan José Campanella (the Oscar nominated Son of the Bride) and co-written with Eduardo Sacheri based on Sacheri’s novel. Ultimately I have serious reservations about this film’s attitude toward the decisions we’ve made in the past and the effect they have on our present lives.
Campanella and Sacheri seem to believe that the courses of action we may have taken in the past, no matter how far removed chronologically, can always be ‘righted’ again. This gives the film a nice mystical sentimentality (and it must be applauded for never crossing the sentimental barrier into saccharine), but there are some choices we make in life that, although they may not have been the best at the time, have a way of becoming too important in your life to simply try again. In other words, some decisions you’re stuck with for the sake of others. I’m being deliberately enigmatic so as not to reveal too much.

There are other key characters I’ve not yet mentioned. First is Benjamín’s partner, the alcoholic Pablo Sandoval, who not only provides some wonderful comic relief amidst the weight of this plot, but also saves Benjamín’s life. The second key character is Romano, a one-time rival of Benjamín in the Justice Department, who single-handedly organizes a miscarriage of justice as an act of vengeance against him.

At the end of the day, The Secret in Their Eyes is a well-crafted and well-intentioned entertainment. I’m not sure it was more deserving of this year’s Foreign Language Film Oscar than The White Ribbon or even A Prophet, but I can clearly see why it won and the Academy could have done far worse.