The taste of daisies

Totally recommended, with galician actors from my homeland like Maria Mera.

Missing

The year 2010, close to Pope Benedict's visit to Santiago. The lieutenant of the Civil Guard Rosa Vargas, a rookie but determined agent of the judicial division, shows up in the Galician village of Murias. She is investigating the disappearance of young Marta Labrada. The local civil guards - Sergeant Alberte, about to retire, and Corporal Mauro, destined to succeed him - have not given the case much importance, as Marta was dealing in drugs and marijuana, and they think she has probably left the village. Mauro is not going to miss her very much, since married and with a daughter, Ana, he was not very happy about her frequenting his company. Be that as it may, the stubborn Rosa insists on her investigations, and will detect strange elements in the case, even linking Marta to a prostitution business, with the firm suspicion that the missing woman is only the tip of the iceberg of a fetishist serial killer, who fantasizes about sexual relations with young girls.

Surprising TV crime series shot entirely in Galician, and with production companies behind the area, which achieved an agreement with regional television and Netflix for distribution, with an unexpectedly good reception. It presents an American-style thriller format, making an effort to avoid clichés -something that is not always achieved, but most of the time- and knows how to keep several cards up its sleeve as the story unfolds, in order to surprise the viewer, sometimes with remarkable twists. He takes advantage of the closed rural world and the reserved Galician character, so it is not surprising that the characters have secrets to hide. And it rightly denounces the sordid world of sexual exploitation of women, and the complicity of the powerful in it.

The series plays well the card of the protagonist, whom the spectator accompanies in the singular trip in which her investigation consists; and the mentions to Dante and the "Divine Comedy", that give title to the chapters, or the constant mentions to the trip of the Pope, are a good resource to create the wished atmosphere, and to contribute to conform a moral point of view on the things that happen in this murky world. And he develops the various characters with the necessary strokes, making it reasonable for Ana to hide information when Rosa interrogates her, for fear of upsetting her parents, to point out the disagreements between Mauro and his wife, or to introduce intriguing elements such as the self-incrimination of a suspect. It certainly has morbid elements, sometimes unpleasant, but director Miguel Conde, with extensive experience in series, knows how to show at least some restraint and subtlety, for example in the question of the satanic cult. The way the case evolves makes sense, it is not carried away by the arbitrary whims of other series that resort to tricks of the trade, the trio of screenwriters -Eligio R. Montero, who has written for many series, and the debutants or almost Ghaleb Jaber Martinez and Raquel Arias- have done their homework well.

This series also serves to discover a group of rather unknown actors, since with the exception of Nerea Barros, the others are unknown, and they do their job well, especially María Mera, who plays the main character, and Miquel Insua, the sergeant about to retire