Following "Narcos", "Banknote House" and "Famous School Storm", Netflix has launched a Spanish drama, which has spread out in the field of small languages and innovated.
The show is 8 episodes long, is a short and concise miniseries, with a solid script, exquisite structure, professional editing, shocking reversals...
After its release, many fans of the drama were willing to use it as tap water and give it to their friends around them.
Today, we're going to talk about it —
The most innocent
The series is based on the novel of the same name by American suspense novelist Harlan Coburn.
Author Harlan Coburn is not only the first American writer to win the most authoritative international Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shamath Award, and the Anthony Award, but also the first American to be selected for the Book Oscar (British Book of the Year Award).
His best work on suspense novels was Dan Brown's Bole, author of The Da Vinci Code.
Three U.S. presidents (Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) are said to be his die-hard fans.
Harlan Coburn
In order to remake this work, Netflix has enabled a very strong creative team - the original version of "Invisible Guest".
Director Oriol Paul, known as the "Reversal King", is an old friend of Chinese audiences.
He first made a sign with his debut work "The Mystery of the Female Corpse", and then became famous in the film world with two works, "Invisible Guest" and "Mirage", and successfully canonized.
Oriole Paul
However, the film of more than a hundred minutes is obviously unable to exert his narrative ambition and careful layout.
Therefore, he took the olive branch handed by Netflix and filmed the drama "The Best of Innocence".
Many of the actors in the play are Paul's royal team.
Actor Mario Casas and actress Ana Wagner, with whom he previously worked on The Invisible Guest. Actress Ora Garrido has previously worked with him on The Female Corpse Mystery.
Just looking at the lineup, this drama has been stabilized half ahead of schedule.
The Invisible Guest vs The Best of Innocence
Compared with Paul's previous works, "The Best of Innocence" constructs more characters and a larger pattern.
He uses a lot of flower work in narrative angles and shooting methods: flashbacks, interludes, parallel montages, crossover montages...
Using these film languages, he connects the clues in the play one by one, forming a complete and ingenious closed loop, burying doubts while justifying themselves.
At the same time, this drama has also made further breakthroughs in scale, with the right to trade money and also the yellow storm bridge section. Many of the corpse photos and bloody scenes look very straightforward.
At the beginning of each episode, the director adopts a personal monologue from the perspective of POV.
The first person narrated in the monologue is not "I", but "you", with an invisible hand, pulling the audience into the protagonist's life situation, stimulating a strong sense of immersion.
Each episode revolves around a new central character: the first episode is the male protagonist Matt; the second episode is the policewoman Lolina; the third episode is the nun Maria and so on.
The director throws all the clues in front of the audience, making the audience piece together the whole piece like a puzzle. Sometimes, unknown details are thrown out, and sometimes repetitive content is told from different perspectives.
The male protagonist, Matt, was originally a high-achieving legal student.
One day, he accidentally got involved in a bar fight and was sentenced to four years in prison for murder.
While serving his sentence, Matt's parents died in a car accident.
After being released from prison, Matt got a good job at his brother's company.
After that, not long after, his brother also died suddenly due to cerebral hemorrhage, leaving Matt alone to inherit his brother's inheritance.
During this time, Matt meets Olivia, who makes him fall in love at first sight, and the two fall in love and marry, forming a happy family.
However, a sudden phone call, a lie of a renunciation, completely shattered Matt's hard-won happy life.
On this day, after receiving a phone call, Olivia immediately said goodbye to Matt and rushed to Berlin on a business trip.
Matt then receives a strange video from a strange man.
On the video, his wife is lying in bed almost naked, suspected of cheating on someone else.
Anxious, Matt tries to ask his wife for clarification.
But he was surprised to find that his wife had not traveled at all, and was still staying in the city, and all the savings they had stored before had been swept away by her.
All indications are that Olivia seems to be hiding an ulterior secret behind it.
At this moment, another case of a nun related to Matt fell from the building in the city.
All kinds of clues show that the fall case is not as simple as it seems, and it is likely to be a murder case.
The nun who fell from the building was not an ordinary person, but a mysterious person with a dual identity.
She was both a nun, Maria, and a stripper, Emma, who not only had tattoos and breasts, but also had a chaotic private life—she had just had sex before her death.
The story told in the second episode mainly revolves around this falling case.
It wasn't until the end of the second episode that the writers took a sharp turn and cleverly linked the fall to Matt—
Lorina, the policewoman in charge of investigating the fall, finds Matt and interrogates him.
And just 30 seconds before Loreena came to the door, Matt had just received a strange phone call.
The other party threatened him, "Your doorbell will ring in 30 seconds, if you dare to reveal half a word, I will cut off your wife's tongue."
Thus, as the plot continues to unfold, superficially unrelated veins begin to intersect and merge with each other, either explicitly or implicitly.
Although the name of the play is "The Best of Innocence", its final foothold is that everyone is guilty.
Everyone who appears in the play has all kinds of secrets and stains.
It is this hidden secret, the inexorable past, that constitutes the reversal of the play's plot, which in turn conveys the message that everyone has a secret: secrets are like tumors, if it is isolated, it will be safe, but if it begins to spread, it will be fatal.
Matt's wife, Olivia, was born in a slum in Mexico and grew up in an orphanage in Mexico.
After smuggling into Spain, she was caught by the police, controlled by gangsters in a brothel in Spain, and forced to become a stripper.
This dirty hell on earth also controls many young girls who have been abducted.
In order to attract guests, the boss Hannibal launched a cruel pornographic service, so that all young girls became the toys of government officials and business tycoons.
Then, behind the scenes, Hannibal illegally extorted these big men by secretly filming their dirty deeds.
In order to escape, Olivia and her sisters engage in a difficult confrontation with Hannibal.
Before escaping, they brought in videotapes that were used as blackmail to make chips.
Unexpectedly, these videos put them in danger again after many years...
Like Paul's other previous works, "The Best of Innocence" is not suspenseful for the sake of suspense, but to reflect some dark and deep human complexity, to see forgiveness in hatred, to awaken resistance in bullying, and to gain redemption in repentance.
Although it is a group drama, the director shows extraordinary control, tapping into the two sides of each character – they are both victims and perpetrators.
Each character carries a label of one kind or another.
For example, Matt is a murderer, and Olivia and Maria are prostitutes.
What the play really wants to explore is a meaningful "innocent" proposition:
If a person has no choice but to commit sins and bear labels, then in the next life, will there be a chance for him to be washed away from his sins?