Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) (2018)

May 8, 2018 (Cannes), September 14, 2018 (Spain), release dates

Directed by Asghar Farhadi

Screenplay by Asghar Farhadi

Music by Javier Limón

Edited by Hayedeh Safiyari

Cinematography by José Luis Alcaine

Penélope Cruz as Laura, Alejandro’s wife, Irene’s mother

Javier Bardem as Paco, Bea’s husband

Ricardo Darin as Alejandro, Laura’s husband and Irene’s father

Bárbara Lennie as Bea, Paco’s wife

Inma Cuesta as Ana, Laura’s younger sister

Elvira Minguez as Mariana, Laura’s older sister and Fernando’s wife

Eduard Fernández as Fernando

Ramón Barea as Antonio, Ana’s, Mariana’s, and Laura’s father and Irene’s grandfather

Sara Sálamo as Rocío, Fernando’s and Mariana's daughter

Paco Pastor Gómez as Gabriel, Rocío’s husband

Carla Campra as Irene, Laura’s and Alejandro’s daughter

Iván Chavero as Diego, Laura’s and Alejandro’s son

Roger Casamajor as Joan, Ana’s fiancé

José Ángel Egido as Jorge, a retired police officer

Tomás del Estal as Andrès, co-owner of the vineyard and Paco’s business partner

Sergio Castellanos as Felipe, Irene’s Spanish friend

Jaime Lorente as Luis

Distributed by Focus Features

Produced by Memento Films, Morena Films, Lucky Red

This blog post about Everybody Knows contains almost all the spoilers. The cast list above includes relationships among characters to help readers (and me!) keep track.

Throughout the time that I watched this film, I kept asking myself the obvious question, “Everybody knows what?” It seems everyone in the village where the film takes place knows that Irene is Laura and Paco’s daughter. Fernando tells Laura’s husband Alejandro this bit of information more than halfway into the film. That’s when viewers learn the secret, but Alejandro has known it all along. Somebody had to have known that fact to want to send messages demanding ransom to Laura, Irene’s mother, and to Bea, Paco’s wife. Paco is Laura’s ex-lover; Irene is the one who has been kidnapped.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The opening credits appear over old, large dusty clockworks and scratched graffiti on the stone walls of a bell tower. In addition to housing the bells of the village’s church, the bell tower is a sanctuary for lovers to find some privacy and get away from prying eyes. But the graffiti they leave behind lets everyone else know what they’re doing anyway. I should say that the graffiti only confirms what everybody suspects: It’s almost impossible to keep secrets in a small village, and this helps explain why “everybody knows.”

After the credits, the film cuts to an overhead shot of a street cleaner in the quiet public square of the village, then cuts to someone wearing plastic gloves and cutting out articles about the disappearance of a young girl named Carmen a couple of decades ago. Then the film switches abruptly to someone holding a cell phone outside the sunroof of a moving car, taking pictures of the surroundings. This person is Irene, and she is showing her father, who is on the phone in Argentina, where she is and what she is doing. Ana is driving, and Laura, Ana’s sister, is in the front passenger seat. In the backseat are Diego and Irene, Laura’s and Alejandro’s children (Alejandro is the one on the phone and the only family member who is not in Spain for the wedding). Ana has picked up Laura and her children at the airport because she is getting married, and Laura, her children, and several other family members are returning to the village to attend the wedding. All of the subsequent family meetings and reunions are pleasant and easy; the extended family certainly gives the impression of being a loving one.

But there is the missing Carmen from years ago. Viewers don’t know who she is and how she is related to the current group of relatives gathering for Ana’s wedding. Thus, a feeling of unease and uncertainty is injected almost from the start, although it’s possible to forget it because the introductions to the family members and their relatives involve a lengthy sequence, and viewers are immersed in the wedding celebration once it gets underway.

The night of the wedding, however, Irene is abducted. The kidnappers leave the newspaper clippings about Carmen’s abduction on Irene’s empty bed. Laura learns that Carmen was eventually strangled and thrown down a well, but there is still no tangible connection made between Carmen and Irene or any members of Irene’s family. Laura gets a text saying that the kidnappers have her daughter and that they will kill her if Laura calls the police. Still, no one is sure if the two abductions are somehow connected. Laura, Paco, Paco’s wife Bea, and Fernando (Laura’s brother-in-law) look for Irene, but they have no luck finding her. Irene needs her asthma medications and can’t go for too long without them, which only adds to the escalating tension.

Jorge is a retired police officer that Fernando consults about Irene’s disappearance and to review the wedding video for clues. Jorge is the one who suggests that someone who knows the family probably committed the crime. The kidnappers had to have known in advance that Laura and her children would be in the village because the kidnapping took some planning. The electricity to the house was purposely cut during the wedding celebration, when everyone was preoccupied. Thus, the kidnappers must have known several details about the wedding, too.

The rest of the film covers the family’s plan to get Irene back. Everyone has to be considered a suspect, which only increases tensions between family members and in the plot. Eventually, Irene is returned home, but only one family member has any idea who the kidnappers are. Laura’s older sister Mariana has suspected her daughter Rocío since she saw Rocío returning late one night with wet jeans and muddy shoes. Mariana keeps her suspicions about her daughter to herself until the end of the film, when Mariana tells her husband Fernando that they need to talk. Fernando sits down at an outside table with Mariana, and the film fades to white.

At first, I thought that Everybody Knows wasn’t terribly noir-ish, but I’ve since changed my mind. In fact, viewers aren’t completely sure what Mariana will tell Fernando. I was—and still am—fairly certain that she tells her husband the truth. But even if she does, I have no idea how Fernando will react or what he and Mariana will decide to do, together or separately. The more I thought about the film, the more uncertain I was about the ending, and that ambiguity is definitely a noir characteristic.

But if you are thinking that the characters are hard to keep track of, you aren’t the only one. I thought the same. Seeing the film again would probably make it easier to follow who is related to whom. The cast list provided at the beginning of this post includes familial relationships, some of which I was able to find on Wikipedia. Even with the list, figuring out everyone’s relationship to everyone else is difficult. I don’t speak Spanish (I watched the film on DVD, which showed the entire film in Spanish with English subtitles), but I don’t think the translation presented any difficulty.

Like many films noir from years ago, Everybody Knows is a film where the details are important. It’s crucial to keep track of the characters and the plot details. Details are revealed as necessary: They come up as part of the plot and in conversation, woven throughout the way actual people would learn them or say them—and thus reveal them—to others.

I’m sure that a second viewing would reveal even more about the plot and the characters, and it would also put me in a different role. On first viewing, viewers could be cast members because they are learning the clues as the characters do. Suspicion is cast on the grape pickers in the vineyard, the wedding videographers, Laura, Paco, Alejandro. Characters and viewers don’t know who to believe or who to trust.

Only once, far along in the narrative, do viewers learn a vital clue before almost all of the other characters in the film: They learn who is responsible for the kidnapping. And it is someone related by blood: Rocío, Mariana and Fernando’s daughter, and her husband Gabriel. Mariana is Laura’s older sister, which makes Rocío Laura’s niece and Irene’s cousin. Jorge, the retired police officer, was right after all.