True crime series, especially when they are based on cases as investigated and exposed in the media as that of Asunta Basterra, are a safe commercial bet. The public is somewhere between gossip and student of the human condition (and that evil that, with a little luck, escapes us in our daily lives), so The Asunta case should work like a shot, at least among subscribers Netflix from the peninsula.
But, in creative and artistic terms, these types of projects are risky because it is difficult not to get carried away by gratuitous morbidity and above all because of the duty to contribute something, to have a reading of horror that is supported by facts. We only have to remember an example as recent as The Body on Fire: because he was so afraid of falling into the most basic drives, he neither opted for the sexual thriller that the promotion (and the facts themselves) predicted, nor did he have a stimulating view of Rosa Peral and Albert López.
Luckily for those who were waiting for The Asunta Case, the creators Ramón Campos, Gema R. Neira, David Orea Arribas and Jon de la Cuesta Olaizola do get it right when approaching the death of the young Asunta, 12 years old, who was found dead in a ditch near Santiago de Compostela in September 2013 after his parents, Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra, reported him missing. The police did not have to investigate many suspects: the parents were soon targeted.
In the miniseries of six episodes, which perhaps should be less, there are three hits above all. The first is the sense of setting, which director Carlos Sedes understands how it should be shot. There is a traditional treatment of scenarios that could not be more real, both because of the work of the locators and because of the feeling of wear and tear and the dirt of everyday life, of stocks without a decorator, of the gray light of a Galicia so accustomed to cloudy days and humidity. It allows us to see Rosario Porto by Candela Peña and Alfonso Basterra by Tristán Ulloa from a realism that contributes to portraying them as characters.
Then, among these virtues, there is a sublime Candela Peña, who understands her task of getting into the skin of another person without falling into overacting at any time. You have to be very inspired to get into a head as complicated as Rosario’s, which to this day is still a question mark, based on her way of walking, her way of speaking, her facade of a dead mosquito, her his instability, always revealing his mental cocoa. Where others would explode expansively in moments of crisis, Peña shrinks into a psychological ball.
And, finally, the quartet of scriptwriters and creators have a clear creative proposal in the portrait of the perpetrators of the Asunta murder. As in other recent works, they do not offer a definitive version of the events but rather explore different hypotheses, especially based on the deductions of the investigating judge by Javier Gutiérrez or the detectives who are so instrumental but at the same time so well humanized by María León and Carlos Blanco. But, even without dispelling all the public’s doubts, they are clever in constructing Rosario and Alfonso as two strange people. Really rare.
The Asunta case, beyond the curiosity surrounding the crime, confronts us with that uncomfortable reality that we are surrounded by neighbors as mundane and recognizable as they are strangers: a priori functional people, who meet the minimum requirements of society, but whose processes mentally escape us and commit unforgivable acts of violence (which, in the case of Asunta, begin before the murder).
The series, starting with the Basterra-Porto marriage, does not exactly talk about evil. It’s even more disturbing. He speaks of the construction of parallel realities in the privacy of the home where, imperceptibly, the most basic ethical and moral principles are deformed.
