Stream It Or Skip It: ‘She Walks in Darkness’ on Netflix, a Spanish Political-Subterfuge Thriller

By John Serba

She Walks in Darkness (now on Netflix) opens with a wall of text explaining the history of the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a paramilitary terrorist group from Spain’s Basque region that formed during Franco’s fascist reign and evolved into a violent separatist group. In the 1990s, the Spanish Civil Guard infiltrated the ETA with spies and, per a title card, “This could be one of their stories.” So this movie, written and directed by Goya-winning filmmaker Augustin Diaz Yanes (Nobody Will Speak of Us When We’re Dead), is a slice of historical fiction, starring Susana Abaitua as an undercover agent tasked with feeding the Civil Guard intel revealing the whereabouts of the ETA’s weapons caches in France – and the result is occasionally tense but maybe too derivative of other such stories.

SHE WALKS IN DARKNESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: JANUARY 23, 1995: A man in a red jacket walks into a bar and guns down a political leader, a man likely to be the next mayor of San Sebastian, in broad daylight. Amaia (Abaitua) hears what happened, and has to pull over and get out of the car so she can throw up. She played a role in this assassination. A small one, but not an insignificant one – a man visited her apartment and she passed along a key to a getaway car. The guilt gnaws at her, but it’s part of the job. A year-and-a-half earlier, Civil Guard honcho (Andres Gertrudix) recruited her to be a mole in the ETA. She’d work undercover as a schoolteacher; she’d visit a comatose woman in a hospital, standing in for her mother and providing a safe place for top-secret communiques; she’d play certain Italian pop songs in her apartment as a means of conveying information to her superiors. She’d also have to leave her boyfriend back in Brussels. It’s a job one can do only if one’s very much alone.

It’s not hard to align with the Civil Guard’s goals – the ETA routinely assassinated politicians, journalists and judges, and bombed public spaces, not caring if innocent civilians, including children, were killed. One of the ETA’s key operatives is Begona (Iraia Elias), who sniffs out Amaia as a potential ally and brings her to a rally where speakers get frothy about their plans to wreak havoc by staging riots in the streets. Amaia lives in an apartment where grim-faced ETA men come to share information, eat meals and criticize her cooking. Keep in mind, this is still an analog era. The ETA and Civil Guard trade intel on tiny scraps of paper like they’re ultra-high-stakes grade-schoolers writing down the names of their crushes and passing notes during class. In one instance, a grimface reads a note, tears it to bits, puts it in the trash and has Amaia run it outside and toss it directly into a passing garbage truck. She soon concocts a plan to hide a false bag of trash in the elevator, and after the ETA reaches the digital age, she digs cut up pieces of a sim card out of the basura and provides her superiors with a crucial piece of intel.

For a while, the film creates a parallel between Amaia, who yearns for her Brussels boy, who wants to marry her, and Begona, who often goes months, even years, without seeing her children, and is dealt a significant emotional blow when her captured husband hangs himself in prison. You work closely with a terrorist long enough, you begin to empathize with the piece of humanity they’ve cordoned off from the ideology in their mind. Such is the psychological tug-of-war of deep-cover work. Begona assigns Amaia to be a driver on various covert missions. One requires her to arm herself even though she’s never fired a gun; it concludes in predictably harrowing fashion. So she quits. Tries to go back to normal life. Agrees to the engagement. And is trying on a wedding dress when she hears a report about awful violence enacted by the ETA. Could she have prevented it? This guilt gnaws at her, too. It’s pretty much impossible to find happiness in this world of binary conflict.

Photo: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, 2024’s Undercover told essentially the same story, and enjoyed significant critical success in Spain. Otherwise, this type of twisty political spy drama dates back to the likes of The Manchurian Candidate and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with traces of criminal-infiltration plots a la Deep Cover and The Departed.

Performance Worth Watching: Abaitua levels out the film by embellishing a relatable character from a fairly threadbare screenplay. She’s excellent at playing someone who’s a bit in over her head and floundering, but when it’s time to strike an authoritative tone, you don’t quite buy it – which is part of who Amaia is, being an important cog in the machine, but a cog nonetheless.

Memorable Dialogue: Begona breaks it to Amaia: “You don’t have a private life… you belong to the ETA.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing notable.

Photo: Netflix

Our Take: She Walks in Darkness has a lot of potential to be a high-tension espionage saga dramatizing a very dangerous game. Its roots in reality theoretically amplify the stakes. But it wrong-foots its way into the story by info-dumping a lot of contextual details on us right off the bat, then awkwardly shoehorns in a flashback framing device that’s a frequent trick filmmakers use for streaming movies, giving us a taste of the drama so we don’t let our short attention spans take over and look for something more immediately satisfying to watch. It’s a clunky way to begin a film for which clarity should be job one, considering it’s about a double agent navigating the thorny brambles of political subterfuge. 

The movie does eventually find its footing the more time we spend with Amaia. Abaitua is a stabilizing force, delivering the consistency the film needs, even as the dangerous game teeters on the edge of being a dangerously boring game. Perhaps the ennui is an honest interpretation of real events – Amaia’s life is distilled down to the interesting interactions that occur over the span of roughly a decade, as it must for a movie that keeps the story tight for 108 minutes – because I imagine the spy business is more often a sit-around-and-wait business than a guns-and-car-chases business. I also understand that it’s a subtle business, where a glance speaks volumes and sleight-of-hand can be more powerful than a haymaker. But it oddly tools along steadily for lengthy stretches, playing a long game of tension-and-release, but it doesn’t truly get our heart rates up until the final 10 minutes.

So it’s obvious that She Walks in Darkness shows little interest in being an action movie. Its interest is internal, in the impact a greater-good mission can have on one person’s life. And as strong as Abaitua’s screen presence can be, the screenplay lacks the depth to communicate more than the most general sense of the job’s toll on the human psyche. Amaia is a frustratingly underwritten character – there’s little detail or complexity to her, and we never once get a sense of her passion for the cause. Is she discontent with normal life? Or does she yearn to settle down and have a family? The screenplay frames her as someone who studies and translates Irish poetry, which reflects her depth of soul, but she otherwise rarely feels like a distinct, fully fleshed-out human being. Maybe that’s what Amaia needs to be in order to be a good spy, but I was too bored to be an apologist. If Yanes’ goal was realism – he cuts in real-life footage and news clips to underscore this approach – it’s hard to debate his success, but the end result is too emotionally drab to fully engage us.

Our Call: Despite its opportunity to springboard off high-stakes real-life events, She Walks in Darkness is a boilerplate spy thriller that struggles to distinguish itself. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.