There’s a secret all right, and it’s how this sprawling but pedestrian drama nabbed this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar over A Prophet and The White Ribbon. Still, this is a case when the inflation of an award hurts more than it helps, and if you can get past the movie’s attempts to pastiche Citizen Kane with Law & Order (Campanella has directed many episodes of the latter), the novelistic pretensions conceal an engaging crime story about a prosecutor (Ricardo Darín) re-examining a for-all-intents-and-purposes unresolved rape-murder case he investigated decades earlier.

Seesawing between the 1970s and the 90s (and engaging with the fallout from Argentina’s “Dirty War” – a campaign against left-wing militants by the military government – in an oblique sense), the flashback structure creates more whiplash than tension; there’s the sense that the movie either needed a tighter focus or should have been a miniseries. Similarly, the protagonist’s 20-year flirtation with a co-worker (Soledad Villamil) often seems like something from another film – as does the distractingly elaborate, apparent long-take chase sequence that constitutes Secret’s major set piece. But if the movie doesn’t exactly shoulder the burden of history, it passes muster as a mystery freighted with more than its share of coincidence and twists.

Ben Kenigsberg

From Time Out Chicago

Dir Juan José Campanella, Category III, 130 mins, Opens Sep 2