The body of a strangled young woman appears in Valladolid. The police soon rule out domestic violence as a motive for the crime due to the characteristics shown on the body: the eyelids have been amputated and the medical examiner finds a piece of paper with a poem in the victim’s mouth. This is the starting point of Memento mori on Amazon Prime Video but, unlike so many murder thrillers, its interest does not lie in discovering who the perpetrator of the crime is with a gallery of suspects on the payroll.
From the beginning, Augusto, the character played by Yon González, is introduced. He has his hair combed as if it were the Spanish equivalent of Christian Bale’s American Psycho. He is a lover of rock music and, as the disturbing trailer for the series showed, he even stands naked in front of the mirror to sing Bravo by Enrique Bunbury and Nacho Vegas. And, as is revealed from the beginning, he carries childhood traumas that he channels by murdering women.
On the police side, Sancho (Francisco Ortiz) is in charge of the investigation, an inspector pending a transfer to Madrid and with a mother with the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, and he has the help of a criminologist known as Carapocha (Juan Echanove) and a university professor (Manuela Vellés). The latter helps him interpret the poems that he leaves on the bodies of the victims and also to understand the nicknames that Augusto uses, who soon realize that he is a lover of literature with intellectual pretensions.
Screenwriters Germán Aparicio, Abraham Sastre and Luis Arranz adapt the novel by Valladolid writer César Pérez Gellida with the conviction that the appeal of the story is not so much in hiding information from the viewer as in creating a cold atmosphere and exploring the disturbing nature of the murderer. series. It is for this reason that the first half of the season, free of script twists to surprise the viewer, works reliably, in part due to the halo of danger that Yon González transmits as the villain of the show: every time he crosses a woman in his path, it is inevitable to feel fear because of that look that conveys that, instead of seeing women, he sees possible prey for his sadistic instinct.
Instead, the second half of the season indulges in twisting the case rather than relying on atmosphere, the killer’s broken, calculating mind, his ability to inspire fear, and the cat-and-mouse dynamic with Sancho. Consequently, the tension is diluted as is the plausibility of the facts and coincidences, although not so much as to not enjoy an entertaining thriller that (hopefully) has a sequel (Gellida wrote three books in this fictional universe).
And González, dedicated to his mission of dissociating himself from the image of the romantic heartthrob or hero of history, forces us to pose the following conversation: where does the process of constructing a character, here unquestionable, end and where does overacting begin? Because there are moments where you can only applaud a performance that gives you goosebumps, committed to the role at every moment, but there are also moments where it forces you to think that you over-braked, looking for that iconic clip that can fall into the parody.
