Two Tombs, review: the Spanish miniseries where revenge is a dish best served double

The series begins with the disappearance of two teenage friends, who went out for a fun evening and never returned home. Marta's lifeless body was recovered from the sea, while Verónica's was never found. Two years after that dramatic night, the case is closed due to lack of evidence and suspects. Isabel, the missing girl's grandmother, faced with the authorities' inaction, decides to launch a personal investigation to discover what really happened in those fateful hours.

In Two Tombs, a title and a premise linked – as the final quote explains – to a saying by Confucius, the woman forms an improbable and dangerous alliance with Rafael, Marta's father, a man involved in the city's criminal underworld who is eager to find and take revenge on his daughter's killer. But during her search, Isabel will face difficult situations and the truth might hurt more than expected.

Two Tombs in a creaky script

The prologue of the first episode, with the scene where we see Isabel disposing of what appears to be a body in a bag, gives us a deliberate spoiler, hinting that the coming narrative will focus on increasingly dark and mysterious tones, leading the protagonist into a true descent into hell that drags her deeper into moral abysses. And this three-episode Spanish miniseries, a new exclusive to the Netflix catalog, certainly has elements to delve deep into the characters' heart of darkness, even if at times it seems to settle into a certain mannerism and not always credible developments, also extending the runtime more than necessary.

The total duration is almost two and a half hours, but the narrative fabric runs out much earlier, and especially the last episode suffers from excessive slowness in the actual resolution of events. While the twist that concludes the second episode is a potential cliffhanger, the motivations behind the incredible revelation are not entirely plausible; certainly, an operation like Two Tombs doesn't pretend to take itself too seriously, but even narrative logic needs slightly more reasoned explanations.

Death and rebirth

The script thus intertwines two attempts at revenge: one by the elderly grandmother who has nothing left to lose, the other co-starring the father of the only confirmed victim, a ruthless and unscrupulous boss. This boss has the Mephistophelian face of Álvaro Morte, the iconic interpreter of The Professor in the cult series Money Heist, while Isabel is played by veteran Kiti Mánver; the cast also includes Hovik Keuchkerian, whom we will soon see in the second season of Red Queen. If the actors work, the same can be said for the direction of Kike Maillo, whom we remember especially for his touching sci-fi debut Eva (2011): the style is clean and a few visionary flashes here and there are certainly welcome, in an often standardized serial landscape.

The staging and those who appear on screen are therefore approved, but where Two Tombs risks getting lost is precisely in that plot which becomes increasingly unnecessarily convoluted, not always finding the right mix between the blindest violence driven by hidden rage and the mystery element, since the investigation is almost solely limited to a recap of impactful solutions, thrown at the viewer without particular care. The epilogue itself, though imbued with its own bitter poetry, ends up being overly rushed, leaving several things unresolved for what will remain and for the actual fate of those at the heart of the tragic premise.