joethfc
Although the plot seemed a little far-fetched I was determined to watch this as Gil, Noriega and Amenabar (loosely). I did find it watchable and intriguing whilst it was on but cracks were showing, as a fan of Noriega's I'd say it's the weakest I've seen him, the character just didn't seem that convincing, surely a writer could do better things with his writer's block than crosswords. The two-faced villain seems to have no tangible motive, I think Molla salvages something from this character but I just don't get him nor understand his insanity.All in all I think at this time Gil was trying to make another Abre Los Ojos, probably wasn't the best way to go.
daniel Carbajo López
A writer of crosswords of a newspaper of Sevilla is "recruited" to play in a lethal game in which he will have to do all his best if he wants to survive. It starts when he is suggested by someone to put the word "adversario" in his next crossword, he could not suspect what was going to happen in the city, in the middle of Holy Week, when he decides to start the game. With great actors, great screenplay and good directing; this is one of this films that keep you stuck into the sofa, in order to discover what is going to happen next. It is compulsory remark the spectacular scene of the battle with toy laser guns in the old part of Sevilla. A really good film.
ciudadlejana
I just saw this film. Wow! Yet another mind-twisting Spanish film. This movie has pushed my fear of cathedrals and the harmless/harmful icons found within. ENoriega's character seems somewhat convincing, yet somewhere along the way, he just doesn't pull through. In general, the characters seem weak (not well developed), but the plot is interesting. Using the sight of the '92 Expo brought back memories of when my uncle went to represent PR!
Alice Liddel
'Nobody knows anybody' is a conspiracy theory thriller about a Satanist/nut bomber targeting the religious festivities of Seville during Holy Week. He also happens to be the best friend of the film's hero. The plot is set up by the bomber as a computer game, with himself and the hero as players, and Seville as the virtual environment. The very real alleys and streets of the city begin to take on the labyrinthine qualities of those old Pacman-type games. Looked at this way, the scene where the hero and his female sidekick are chased by black-hooded penitents with rayguns may not seem as silly as it plays. From the start, we are aware that the narrative is being constructed as a game - the hero's job is to create crossword puzzles for a popular newspaper; at one point, the crossword grid on his screen becomes the chessboard on which he is later playing against his girlfriend's father. Clues are liberally scattered, as the camera mystifyingly closes in on images that are only later shown to have been significant (e.g. the advert in the bar). The detective/paper chase elements are made part of a game in progress, rather than an investigation after the fact. The film borrows heavily on 'Se7en''s pattern narrative, and anyone with a Catholic education will presumably get the significance of certain events happening on certain days in the run up to EAster.In this reading, the game is on the level of narrative, with the hero fighting against an enemy (in this case, the computer) to win and save the day. But there is a second game, the film itself, which subvert the first. There are another set of of clues which point not to the killer's intentions, but the filmmaker's and his hero's. In the first ten minutes there are references to chess, a writer called Navokov and a cult leader called Sarin. If we remember that the chess-loving Nabokov's 1930s pseudonym was Sirin, we see another game afoot, one where we suspect not the villain, but the hero himself. In a Nabokov novel like 'Pale Fire', an author-figure creates a text which is designed to hide his own motives, provoking a game between writer and reader to uncover the real text. Throughout the film are scenes which are visually distorted (e.g. the image contracting), or which are ambiguously defined dreams and hallucinations that make us suspect the hero's point of view. The opening references to games are all linked to him. In the early sequences, much is made of the character's sexual and creative impotence, so the film could be his attempt to master his life, to be a winner, in a way he can't for real. No sooner has he won the game than his writer's block vanishes; the words he types are the title of the film, suggesting he is the overall author. Further, that title in Spanish reflects on itself negatively, a very Nabokovian involution that suggests a hero, like Kinbote, trapped in his own solecism.This jumble of post-modern literature (Borges, Eco, Pynchon et al are alluded to also), Fincher, 'X-Files', 'Run Lola Run', Chris Marker (the idea of the city and its history as a map and a text; and as a cultural history haunting the present), Bunuellian anti-clericism, and Alex de la Iglesia's 'shock' films result in a film that is just that, a jumble, each clever-clever allusive element cancelling out the last, dissipating interest. The lack of clarity about the game's rules renders it incomprehensible, and eventually wearing. Ironically, in a work of such overdetermined artifice, the film's main interest lies in its documentary quality, as a record of a narrative taking place in a real city with its own events taking place independently. Such an ambiguous blurring of fact and fiction can create a masterpiece like 'Sans Soleil' or 'London', but, ultimately, you need to have a light touch to match your cleverness.
