First season
Javier Cámara and Mónica López star in this fiction that begins with the murder of the mayor of Cedeira, a fishing village in the province of La Coruña
The sequence is very tense. The thick fog covers everything. And there is Tomás (Javier Cámara), walking on top of the mountain, without knowing very well where each stride takes him. A scream interrupts their morning walk. He hastens his pace until he comes across a woman lying on the ground, surrounded by mud, dirt and grass, with a bloody head. In the distance, Tomás thinks he sees someone walking away, wearing a green raincoat, and hears the engine of a vehicle that seems to be fleeing the scene of the crime. It’s a few seconds, but it seems like an eternity. The woman manages to say three words to him before falling unconscious, like in an Agatha Christie novel. Tomás stops a vehicle and with the help of the driver manages to take the woman to the hospital, but the doctors cannot do anything to save her life. Maite (Mónica López), a Civil Guard sergeant, tells him that she is Amparo Seoane, the mayor of Cedeira, a municipality of just seven thousand inhabitants located in the province of La Coruña.
This is how ‘Rapa’ begins, the new fiction created by Pepe Coira and Fran Araújo and directed by Jorge Coira together with Elena Trapé, the people behind the entertaining ‘Hierro’. Like this one, ‘Rapa’ is once again an intense thriller focused on the characters, which stands out for its brilliant staging -it includes some of the most beautiful landscapes in the region in which the action takes place-, where one comes to feel the cold, the wind and the humidity that settles in the bones, although sometimes it sins of liking itself too much, as can be seen in the abuse of the drone or in the endless slow-motion shots.
The peculiarity of ‘Rapa’ lies in the fact that, in reality, a few minutes after the fiction raises the issue, the viewer already knows who the murderer of the mayor is, but not the protagonists. He knows nothing, however, about the reasons behind the terrible action and that will be revealed little by little, as in good stories of intrigue and mystery. In this sense, there is nothing new under the sun, but the story is very well put together and the six chapters look good.
Tomás and Maite, played by Mónica López, just after the crime.
Beyond the great visual invoice of fiction, it is in the characters where Coira and Araújo hit the nail on the head again. The main one is Tomás, a language and literature teacher at a Cedeira institute, somewhat fed up with his monotonous day-to-day life. The mayor’s murder will soon ignite his meager bloodhound skills and test his lack of social skills. A good part of the town has it like a freak. Hermetic and somewhat sullen, Tomás sees in crime the only possibility of experiencing something similar to what he has experienced through the hundreds of novels he has read throughout his life. He will try like this, to get out of that shell in which he has lived in recent years. Camera once again stands out for the naturalness it prints on this clumsy Jessica Fletcher impersonator.
Maite, the sergeant, inevitably reminds Judge Candela of ‘Hierro’. She is a strong, intelligent and characterful female character, in which López unfolds without problems. Her daughter goes to Tomás’s class and, aware of his strangeness, she doesn’t buy it. Working alongside her will be an agent from Madrid, played by Jorge Bosch, a character who has a very clear function: he is the pillar on which the viewer leans and makes it easier for them to get to know all the idiosyncrasies that surround Cedeira and her population. Along with them, a gallery of characters as strange as they are attractive that serves to break down some of the secrets that the mayor kept.
And it is that ‘Rapa’ not only talks about a crime and the barriers that the protagonists must overcome to solve it; It also describes, and very wisely, a type of politics, rather populist, framed in small municipalities where everyone knows each other, and marked by favoritism and prejudice. Already in the first minutes of the narration, the first questions arise about the motive for the crime: The start-up of a mine that is going to pierce one of the mountains of the municipality? Old personal grudges? Political shenanigans? The truth is that you want to delve into the mystery.
The series will arrive on Movistar Plus + on May 19.
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