REVIEW: ‘The Truthers’ Is An Imperfect Mystery-Thriller

The Truthers, a Netflix original film from Spain, investigates how families can be ripped apart by conspiracy theories, but falters in building a fully cohesive mystery.

Ruth (Stéphanie Magnin), a Spanish bartender living in Berlin, has been estranged from her parents, Martín (José Coronado) and Lucía (Fanny Gautier), for several years. She thinks it’s odd when Lucía repeatedly calls and texts over the course of a day, desperate to talk, but Ruth ignores her. When Martín calls to say Lucía is dead, Ruth rushes back to her hometown in Spain, and the films chilling tone kicks into gear.

As Ruth arrives home, the town, lushly captured by cinematographer Juana Jiménez, is consumed by the search for a missing local boy. Martín is more fixated on finding the boy than he is on grieving his wife. Convinced that a local pharmaceutical company is kidnapping children and experimenting on them, Martín is desperate to find the child, less out of justice for the child and more to prove his conspiracy theory. He hardly has time to mourn Lucía, which raises Ruth’s suspicions.

The Truthers builds a mystery out of familial tragedy. 

Ruth is told that Lucía died, wine glass in hand, in a locked room, but Ruth remembers her mother hated locked doors and never drank. The facts, coupled with Martín’s disinterested behavior, raise red flags, and Ruth begins to wonder if her father is involved in her mother’s death. His obsession with conspiracies and unwillingness to be talked out of them lead Ruth to realize her return home is the start of a slippery slope into Martín’s madness. The Truthers becomes as much a mystery in Lucía’s death as it is an investigation of Martín’s mind.

Magnin is a compelling lead, balancing Ruth’s grief with her disbelief that her father has turned into someone she no longer recognizes, and could even be capable of murder. Her desperation to find sense in a father who believes she is willfully ignorant is heartbreaking and vivid in a time where the internet is a cesspool for fringe theories.

Coronado, as Martín, is believably nuanced and at times just as heartbreaking, playing a man whose worst fears have been exploited by endless doom scrolling. Ruth catches her father listening to a podcast about pharmaceutical coverups, and there’s a sense that even though Martín was an overbearing father when Ruth was young, that extremity has only been heightened in adulthood.

The Netflix thriller looses track of its plot. 

The mystery at the heart of The Truthers, for much of the runtime, centers on whether or not Martín killed Lucia. It’s a compelling enough mystery, but it doesn’t revive the mystery of what happened to the missing boy until far into the film’s runtime. It’s so often neglected as a plot point that, by the time it returns to the forefront, it’s a dangling thread that feels shoehorned in to create drama in the final act. 

Also underdeveloped is Martín’s relationship to Berta (Mabel Del Pozo), a fellow conspiracist whose obsession with surveillance states estranged her from her own family. Mabel’s underutilized as a character, appearing only in the film’s final scenes. Underutilization is a common issue in Darío Madrona and Carlos Montero‘s screenplay. Most characters feel like props to Ruth’s investigations and Martín’s obsessions rather than well-rounded figures.

Where The Truthers lets Ruth down is in giving her a life outside of the film. We have glimpses of her past. She was a champion swimmer when she was young, she has an ex-boyfriend (Alberto Olmo) in town who listens to her concerns about her dad. But each of these feels like a means to an end rather than a focus on well-roundedness. Her past as a swimming champion is hardly touched on and barely makes a splash.

While the emotional moments land, the film struggles with being too straightforward. 

In one scene, Ruth swims in a lake, and eventually discovers plot-relevant information for her investigation. Still, no reference is made then to her past as a swimmer, nor are her swimming skills particularly relevant to her discovery. Arón, her ex-boyfriend, is a cancer survivor whose prior illness is a means for Martín to espouse his views about pharmaceutical companies deliberately giving people cancer.

It’s a shame The Truthers falters in rounding out its world, because director Roger Gual has a solid grasp on tone. When The Truthers delves into Ruth’s fears about the depths of her father’s sanity, it becomes a genuinely heart-wrenching look at how vulnerable people can be to unfounded internet claims and the determination to see nefariousness everywhere. It’s a surprisingly straightforward film, not creating twists so much as moving from one plot development to the next with little surprise, yet it maintains a chilling tone throughout.

The Truthers isn’t a perfect mystery-thriller, but Magnin’s grounded performance is a compelling reason to watch. There’s a palpable sense of fear and distress as Ruth tries to uncover what happened to her mother without falling victim to her own conspiracies about her father. In any case, what remains is a decent watch, if imperfect in execution. If only the truth, in real life, were as straightforward as The Truthers.

The Truthers is out now, exclusively on Netflix.