Review of Perdida

Netflix movies do not have a great track record with me. Perdida does in no way make me think differently. The subject would lend itself for a thriller or a film Noir. My bet would have been with the latter. The music, perhaps the one outstanding aspect of the movie, seems to chosen for a kind of setup. But the movie is too unfocused to be anything at all. This then is its greatest weakness: it spends too much time on side stories and back stories that break up the pacing, take away the mystery and often seem irrelevant. One example is the time given to the criminals. They get extensive screentime. A better director would have chosen to have their activities discovered by the lead, like for instance in Sicario, where Emma Blunt stays the focus of the movie and we discover through her what happens. Another example would be the Third Man or the Maltese Falcon, where again the focus stays on the lead. If a back story is required, it is told in dialogue or given a very short screentime. Perdida also suffers from a direction that tries too hard to be nifty with the camera and misses movie gems at the same time. Nice scenes are not exploited by good framing, but often marred by 'bobbing' camera work: in one scene the camera moves from a heavy grey and snowy sky downward to a street view. This maneuver is clearly too much for the cameraman to handle and results in him(or her) losing grip.

All in all a movie feels like it is overreaching itself. Perhaps try and make a small movie instead of attempting to make an epic one?