EVERYBODY KNOWS: A Compelling, Visceral Nightmare

Critically acclaimed director Asghar Farhadi returns to cinema screens with Everybody Knows. Penélope Cruz stars as Laura, who arrives in Spain from Argentina with her two young children to celebrate a relative’s wedding. Leaving her husband at home and finding tranquillity in the life she left decades ago with old flame Paco, played by Javier Bardem, the trip soon turns awry after her daughter inexplicably disappears from her bedroom on the night of the wedding.

What starts as a simplistic “whodunnit” narrative soon blossoms into a compelling visceral nightmare of intangible family deceit and passive aggressive financial and psychological gain that boils into a contextually bilious prism of haunting circumstance.

A Compelling Narrative

After Farhadi‘s universally applauded (and Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Language Film) The Salesman in 2016, all eyes were on his next project. Ultimately Everybody Knows, a film long gestating in development even before the pre-production of The Salesman, continues the director’s ongoing trend of anxiety-driven dramatic cinema that wonderfully coaxes the demonic presence of lust, greed and turmoil into a deeply foreboding and harrowing fallout.

The “whodunnit” undertone (while a wonderfully vibrant and dark homage to the likes of Agatha Christie) is the deceitful backburner and the catalyst for Farhadi‘s lethal exposure to the true heart and soul of Everybody Knows. A Sherlock Holmes tale this is not. It is rugged, sharp, yet a blunt force. This is a film that questions how far greed and lust deter or enable the boundaries of honesty with the exploration of such divulging the deepest darkest corners and most honest awe-inspiring heights of love and passion.

The theme of terror truly personifies the emotional tendencies of what Farhadi‘s film harbours. It evokes a constant juxtaposed fretting of unanswerable and daunting grey areas of moral ambiguity. A haunting spectacle to bear witness as an audience member, the story unravels and bloodthirsty wolves come out to hunt, the fear of truth never finding a home. Everybody Knows is a slow but assured tragedy on all sides. Severely solidified in the cinematography by José Luis Alcaine, who puts forward a terrific tool within its framing and composition utilising a 1.85:1 image on screen to craft a claustrophobic edge. The close proximity of characters and the narrative enchants the audience, bringing an intense atmospheric disposition to proceedings, almost feeling utterly inescapable but undeniably addictive in the grand empty scale of a small town just north of Madrid.

The screenplay by Farhadi balances a wonderful thread of aggressive pessimism and hopeful belief. Discussions of faith, ill decision and honesty are in profound wealth, but never overtake the intense narrative of enigmatic nature that surrounds the unfolding tale. Themes and threads go hand in hand with the hypocrisy of the emotional turmoil that corrupts characters, although much of the material – inadvertently or not – is left to the imagination of its audience to decipher and ultimately settle. Many integral sub-plots are left waiting in the wind, perhaps to contextually flounder to a parasitic downfall in the family’s dynasty, or in fact a struggle of Farhadi himself to craft a cynical nature of threads that should have hit far harder.

The score by composer Javier Limón is sadly a little non-eventful. It fails to engulf the images on screen and really incite the plot as it unfolds in either a dramatic or atmospheric fashion. It is ironically the diegetic sound within the film that creates the most ferocious and compelling of situations. The whisk of wind and faintest sound of inhabitants evokes whispers and tales from the town’s occupants surrounding the kidnapping event. A suitably crafty and exceptionally unnerving tone credited to the outstanding sound department that plays out like a small church choir performing a soft eerie hymn of sorts.

Engulfing Performances

Penélope Cruz is outstanding as main character Laura. The sheer magnitude of psychological emotional devastation Cruz brings to the role is majestic and deeply traumatic to behold. The talent conveyed in Everbody Knows by Cruz is exceptional in the context of how captivating and demanding her screen presence is. It has an immense, poignant, yet grounded gravitas that surrounds itself, pulling you in with an extraordinary intoxicating effect regarding the immense emotional strain and daunting position her character is placed in. Almost a train wreck of moral ambiguity in simplistic terms. The physical deterioration in the embodiment of this character and how she conveys grief is almost overwhelmingly visceral to a point of a haunting unnerving manifestation.

Javier Bardem, collaborating with his real-life partner and wife Cruz for the fifth time, puts forward a wonderfully stoic and emotionally captivating turn as Paco, old flame to Cruz’ Laura. A character who is caught between the eerie angst and indecision what he believes in his head and his heart with a thunderous fallout of suspicious truths and honest lies. The performance is a terrific turn for Bardem, who truly excels in a character that erodes in the murky waters of deceptive judicious of fragile tectonic plates that divide family and loyalty. Animistic to that of Bardem‘s turn in Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s Biutiful, released in 2010 with a hearted and weighted charter study.

Everybody Knows: Conclusion

Everybody Knows is another internally chaotic and character conflicting turn for critically acclaimed director Asghar Farhadi, that has the most simplistic and explosive reveals in the most cavalier and subtle ways – an atmospheric and intense feature that revels in deceit and multifaceted avenues of ambiguous intent. It is slightly heavyset clocking in at over two hours with multiple avenues left explored and a ferocious ambitious finale thrown in for good measure, however, it undoubtedly manages to grasp your attention with an outstanding central performance by Penélope Cruz (one of her best to date) cementing this as a hard hitting, harrowing and compelling picture.

Everybody Knows is out now in the US, and on March 8 in the UK.