Summary
1992 doesn’t realize its villain is the most interesting thing about it until close to the end, leaving the rest of the runtime to be devoted to characters who’re uninteresting at best and actively aggravating at worst.
The best part of 1992 is undoubtedly the villain, which coincidentally is the part it focuses on the least. But it counts for something. There are enough crime dramas on streaming platforms these days that anything standing out is an upside, and there’s something particularly creepy about some of the uses of scarred flesh and fire reflecting in demented eyes here. Everything else is a bit rubbish, though.
You can tell 1992 doesn’t think this, though; it proceeds like it invented the crime genre and is premiering some of its more cliché details for the very first time. It takes particular pleasure in the image of a Curro, a bird-like mascot with a rainbow beak and mane that is intimately tied to a failed maritime expedition designed to celebrate Columbus’s departure from Seville in search of the Americas. There’s a very real feeling that the expectation is that TikTok will be awash with these things and that every kid next Halloween will be wearing one, like the jumpsuits and masks from Squid Game. I’m not so sure.
Here, the Curro is the calling card of a pyromaniac serial killer who is killing off connected executives, one of whom is the husband of our female lead, Amparo (Marian Álvarez – When Angels Sleep). In her grief, which she barely displays, she teams up with her late husband’s alcoholic ex-cop friend Richi (Fernando Valdivielso) to unconventionally investigate the case.
And I never bought into this relationship. Amparo doesn’t seem to care much about her husband’s death, and Richi feels like he’s just helping to get closer to her. The connection – which is pretty much instant – rings false, despite some explanatory flashbacks showing previous meetings and lingering glances under slightly better circumstances. The villain has much more of a connection to the underlying story than either of them, but you don’t learn that until a point in the six-part series when viewers will have either tapped out already or will be persevering to the end regardless. The initial hook is very difficult to come by.
And the acting is a real turn-off. When it isn’t blasé and unconvincing it’s wildly overblown; Richi’s struggle to sustain his sobriety forms a crucial element of the show’s first half, and his eventual, inevitable descent into the bottle is ridiculous. He eventually begins to hallucinate the presence of his dead friend, half-headed and barbecued, which is clearly intended to be horrifying but that I found absolutely hilarious.
This is what creates that uncomfortable feeling of a telenovela, a soapy quality exacerbated by directors Álex de la Iglesia and Rodolfo Martínez not believing in their actors enough to allow them to converse in a simple wide or shot-reverse-shot; instead, every scene is death by a thousand cuts and confusion from a thousand angles. It’s needlessly fussy filmmaking that, again, speaks to delusions of grandeur that 1992 doesn’t earn.
The last couple of episodes are, to be fair, a distinct improvement, and finally add enough flesh – horribly disfigured though it may be – to justify the investment, but it might be too little too late. My genuine worry here is that nobody will stick around long enough to get to the good stuff, and contrary to the show’s expectations, its imagery isn’t anywhere near powerful enough to grip people without a solid story behind it.
