Stream It Or Skip It: ‘God’s Crooked Lines’ on Netflix, A Twisty Murder Mystery Set Inside an Asylum (2024)

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.