Mark Reviews Movies: PERFECTOS DESCONOCIDOS (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 10, 2019

The seventh or eighth remake of this material (depending on whether or not one counts "official" remakes, with credit given to the original screenwriters), Perfectos Desconocidos (in English, "perfect strangers") is also the first version of this story to receive any substantial release in the United States (A South Korean adaptation had a very limited release last year). One can immediately understand the appeal of the premise, coming from an Italian movie, which, by the way, was only released three years ago (For some perspective, that's an average of between two and three remakes per year). There's obviously something to the setup—not only its novelty but also its universality—that explains why so many filmmakers, from so many different parts of the world, would be attracted to the material.

This version, written and directed by Manolo Caro, comes from Mexico (Just to keep adding to the trivia and the potential confusion, this isn't the first version with this particular variation of the title or in Spanish, either, since there was a remake from Spain released there in 2017). It likely will serve as the first introduction to the story for anyone in the U.S. (It was mine).

Once it gets past the admitted cleverness of the premise, though, the movie basically becomes little more than a one-set soap opera, in which predictably terrible or fairly ordinary secrets are revealed and handled with little nuance. It doesn't help that, among the movie's seven main characters, only two of them turn out to possess a consistent degree of basic decency.

All of them look fine on the surface, and that's the belabored irony of this story. There are three couples and a perennial third, fifth, or seventh wheel, who gather for a dinner party and make what might be the dumbest decision of their lives—especially for the ones who really aren't decent in even the slightest degree.

The story's gimmick is that the friends decide upon a "fun" "game" to play while enjoying each other's company. They'll leave their cellphones on the dinner table, and each time a phone receives a notification, the entire group gets to hear the message. Texts and emails are read aloud, and phone calls are put on speaker. Obviously, this idea makes for the promise of drama, as long as a filmmaker is as willing to explore the consequences as to exploit the inevitable tension and conflict. Let's just say that Caro indulges in the second part, but he botches the more important aspect.

As for the characters, the couples are newlyweds Mario (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and Ana (Ana Claudia Talancón), upper-classers Alonso (Bruno Bichir) and Eva (Cecilia Suárez), the obviously struggling Ernesto (Miguel Rodarte) and Flora (Mariana Treviño). Their single friend is Pepe (Franky Martin), an unemployed divorced man whose new love interest is too sick to join them. The idea to open up everyone's cellphones to the scrutiny of the group comes after an innocent discussion about how much of people's lives are kept and spent on their phones. Everyone agrees to participate, and quickly we learn that some of them only agreed because declining would be akin to an admission of guilt.

All of them, save for two, are actually guilty of something, and one of the innocents is "guilty" of something in the minds of a few of his/her so-called friends. It's strange how Caro handles that particular revelation, since it begins as a joke and then becomes a critique of hidden bigotry brought out into the open. The condemnation, though, doesn't quite work, since the movie expects us to laugh at the implications and the awkwardness, only to turn the tables when the movie enters its dramatic phase. Most of the early revelations, for that matter, are treated as jokes at first, which makes it more difficult to care about the results when the tone decidedly shifts.

As for the guilty parties, there are affairs—both physical and, in one case, "virtual"—and implied pedophilia and unspoken plans for an elderly parent and the truth about a car accident that left a man dead (Caro really downplays this subplot) and, eventually, the fact that these seemingly tolerant people can't accept something different when it's right in front of them. If there's a lesson to take from this, it's the obvious moral that everyone has a secret and that truth, as unlikely as it may seem, will out.

That's the case until a certain point in the movie's schematic. As well-acted as the movie is and as enticing as its central game may be, there's little evading how thoroughly the movie falls apart with its final revelation. The climax of Perfectos Desconocidos appears to give us a hastened sense of the real consequences of a night of secrets come to light and true feelings brought to the surface. It feels like a simple morality play about the difficult but necessary nature of honesty. A final twist, though, transforms the movie into something else—and something far more dishonest—entirely.

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