god's crooked lines movie review

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God’s Crooked Lines Review and Ending Explained – A Patient Thriller That Rewards the Viewer for their Time

God’s Crooked Lines is a bit of a chore and time commitment, considering the run time alone. That’s even if you’re a fan of sensationalized melodrama, which this film leans towards. While the script tends to steer away from more serious issues of how the medical community and ourselves view and treat mental health, there is much to like here in the Torcuato Luca de Tena adaptation , including a scintillating lead performance, a well-constructed script, and an overall tone that is not easy to shake.

God's Crooked Lines Review and Plot summary
Is God's Crooked Lines worth watching?
God's Crooked Lines Ending Explained - How Does Alvar Prove Alice's Story is Fabricated?

God’s Crooked Lines Review and Plot summary

The title of God’s Crooked Lines refers to why a higher authority with so much power would draw the line at helping people with mental health issues in need of de Tena’s novel of the same name.

The story follows Alice (Barabara Lennie), a private investigator who begins masquerading as a patient institutionalized in an asylum for attempting to poison her husband, Heliodoro ( Pau and his Brother ‘s David Selvas). Now, why would anyone do that? Look over the great (fictional) PIs of our time, like Hercule Poirot or Benoit Blanc. They don’t do it for the money or the fame but to seek the truth and bring justice to those who need it.

Alice’s mission is to investigate the death of Dr. Damian Garcia del Olmo’s (Lluís Soler) son, who committed suicide. The good doctor thinks there was a coverup. Alice even lies to her husband about her whereabouts, as del Olmo requested complete anonymity.

Of course, a classic horror trope, when she enters, she gets more than she can handle, and the staff may be just as dangerous as their patients. The longer alive stays, the more others question her motives.

According to Alice, de Olmo contacted the head of the facility, Dr. Alvar, about the plan. Here, part of the cover is that Alice has a psychiatrist, Dr. Donadio, write a letter. Part of it says never to believe her lies.

Alice wants to make everyone believe she was admitted because her husband had legally kidnapped her. This gives her a plausible excuse for why Alice is not mentally ill. She can now investigate del Olmo’s son’s death without suspicion. There is an additional exploration of this subject in an alternative timeline. In what first appears to be flashbacks, showing a dead young man in his cell. He dies from a crushing blow and stab wounds. How can this be suicide?

Directed by Oriol Paola, who helped write the script with Guillem Clua and Lara Sendim, it may appear to have too many hands in the cookie jar. However, the labyrinth plot and the extraordinary way timelines are brought together suggest brilliant teamwork.

Here, we have a genre of a Spanish film called esperanza masquerading as an unsettling psychological thriller, a somewhat exaggerated, sensationalized, and melodramatic work that wants to expose and say something about society’s truths.

Here, we can only speculate, but Tena’s novel explores power, cancel culture, and how they converge. Perhaps navigating the current world we live in with disinformation is easier said than done.

The film suffers from some red hearings and too many characters to not offer anything but distractions and have greater context in the novel. At a massive running time of 155 minutes, the film shows extraordinary patience in plotting to sway the viewer’s opinion in multiple directions.

The flashback scenes are well done. When these plot points converge, it may remind you of such films as Rendition . The writers use great finesse and make this task look much easier than it is.

All of this means the performance by Lennie is quite extraordinary, especially in a film of this length and with how much screen time she has. From when she enters the facility as a wealthy aristocrat to her haunting final framed shot, few actors can carry such melodramatic material for that time frame and still make you care about where the film ends. It’s a performance that won’t get the credit it deserves.

Is God’s Crooked Lines worth watching?

The film is essentially a long battle of wills and wits between Lennie’s Alice and Fernandez’s Alvar. While the film may have been better served as a miniseries to hit and emphasize plot points with greater emphasis, God’s Crooked Lines is an extraordinarily patient psychological thriller, one that rewards viewers for their time and dedication, especially for fans of the genre.

God’s Crooked Lines Ending Explained – How Does Alvar Prove Alice’s Story is Fabricated?

God’s Crooked Lines (Credit – Netflix)

In a surprise development, the flashbacks involving the death are masked but are in the present day. So, this wasn’t a flashback, but it can be called a flash-forward in the future. Alice started the fire to escape.

The dead body is one of the twins, Romulus and Remus, who the Elephant man killed because one of them killed his friend who attacked Alice. That boy was Remus, but the killer mistook Romulus for him. Alice uses all this as she investigates the brutal murder and solves the crime to the police called into the facility. This gives Alice enough credibility to get a board meeting to vote on her sanity to be freed.

At the meeting, Alvar will excuse himself from the vote if they accept his resignation letter and send it to the man who hired him. He points out the failure of mental health professionals to support each other’s clinical judgments. The board votes and they are unanimous in letting Alice go. Before Alvar leaves, he takes one last swing at proving his diagnosis.

How does Alvar prove Alice’s story is fabricated? He turns around and announces they cannot reach Dr. Donadio because he is traveling with his wife and he is outside. Alvar leaves and Donadio walks in.

It is the man Alice knew as Dr. Damian Garcia del Olmo! “Alice, what have you gotten yourself into now?” he asks. The camera looks closely at Alice, and you see her snap in her mind again, searching for why she is not mentally ill.

As you can see, Alice’s story and theories did not keep changing because of the plot, but she kept adjusting the tall tale to make excuses for why her ego could not handle the fact she needed help.

*For the more significant context, while the film ends on that note, the book ends with Alice leaving, but she chooses to go back inside to seek the help she needs.

What did you think of God’s Crooked Lines, and ending? Comment below.

Article by Marc Miller

Marc Miller (also known as M.N. Miller) joined Ready Steady Cut in April 2018 as a Film and TV Critic, publishing over 1,600 articles on the website. Since a young age, Marc dreamed of becoming a legitimate critic and having that famous “Rotten Tomato” approved status – in 2023, he achieved that status.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘God’s Crooked Lines’ on Netflix, A Twisty Murder Mystery Set Inside an Asylum

Where to stream:.

God's Crooked Lines

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A truism often attributed to Dostoyevsky posits: “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Netflix original God’s Crooked Lines asks if the same could be said for Spain’s mental institutions in the late 1970s. When a detective immerses herself in an asylum to find the truth about the mysterious death of a patient, she ends up finding out less about the lives of those who roam – and control – the institution.

GOD’S CROOKED LINES : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Damián García del Olmo dies within the walls of an asylum, setting off a chain of events that leads to the entry of private investigator Alice Garcia (Bárbara Lennie) to solve the case. She presents herself under the guise of a patient so she can get a ground-level view of the institution and suss out the suspects. With the help of a self-aware and smart inmate Ignacio (Pablo Derqui), she begins to get a clearer view of the patients and their care.

The deeper she gets into her sleuthing, the more she begins to suspect something off with the doctors led by Samuel Alvar (Eduard Fernández). But homing in on them as implicated in the death triggers a strong defensive response, using their power as the designated authorities to question whether or not Alice is who and what she says. They wield a frayed relationship with her husband, who managed to evade death by poisoning several times, as a cudgel to delegitimize her efforts to find the truth. Nothing is as it seems in this psychiatric ward, including potentially Alice.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: God’s Crooked Lines starts out like a spin on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a *seemingly* sane person entering an asylum. But it quickly turns into Shutter Island as Alice finds her new environs anything but a wonderland, raising the question of whether she’s being gaslit, whether the institution made her go insane, or if she’s been like this all along.

Performance Worth Watching: Given the number of twists and turns of fate in Alice’s story, it’s on actress Bárbara Lennie to ground the proceedings in the immediate psychological reality of the character. It’s a tough task that she proves capable of pulling off with grace and grit.

Memorable Dialogue: “If God created us in his image and likeness, like a sculpture with no imperfections,” posits the asylum’s head Samuel Alvar, “the patients who end up here would be like God’s crooked lines when he was learning to write.” Obviously, any explanation of an unusual title grabs attention, but this one provides additional intrigue as it’s a queasy description of the institution’s patients, to say the least.

Sex and Skin: The only nudity in the film is incidental within the prison walls, so don’t expect any titillation from a cavity search or a communal shower.

Our Take: God’s Crooked Lines starts strong but eventually sinks under the weight of its own complexity. At over two-and-a-half hours, this mystery adapted from Torcuato Luca de Tena’s novel is dense with enough game-changing developments. At a certain point, it feels like co-screenwriter and director Oriol Paulo just loses the thread. The wheels start to fall off when outright bedlam opens up inside the asylum, plunging us into outright “gaslight gatekeep girlboss” territory with Alice. The filmmaking is ultimately not strong enough to merit the amount of mental energy required to keep up with a world in which every motivation or moment can be second-guessed.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The ambiguities of God’s Crooked Lines only serve to inspire ambivalence. Flashes of intrigue and undeniable intentionality will undeniably draw in some patient viewers. But the film does not make a strong enough case for how much effort it would take to come to one’s own answer to the unresolved ending by untangling the web of competing narratives.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

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