After a night of heavy drinking, policeman Javier (Antonio Resines)
wakes up in a strange bed, besides Natalia (Esperanza Roy), a woman he has
never seen before - and that despite the fact that he is married to Bea
(Marta Belaustegui), who is expecting his baby -, and no recollections of
last night safe from something involving a hair salon. And when he passes
the hair salon later that morning, he finds it locked while in his car he
finds a sport bag containing scissors covered in blood ...
Later that day, Javier receives a call from headquarters about a murder
- that has occured in exactly the hair salon where he has been last night
- and suddenly Javier realizes that he could become the prime suspect in
this case ... but what's worse, he has no idea if he's innocent or not ...
So, while he can't keep his marriage from breaking up, Javier also has
to investigate what exactly happened last night - and he has to keep his
investigations secret from his colleague and friend Santiago (Pere
Arquillué), who officially handles the case.
Javier's investigations quuickly lead him to Alicia (María Adánez),
the deceased's crippled but beautiful sister, for whom he soon develops a
soft spot, and from her he eventually learns about a bag of money her
brother is supposed to have stolen from a trio of gangsters - a story that
suddenly puts Javier in the clear, at least in his own mind, because he
might have the bag and the murder weapon (the scissors), but he doesn't
have the money - so there simply must have been someone else.
An attempt to involve Natalia - the woman he woke up next to - and her
husband in his investigations goes horrribly wrong though when hubby is
tortured by the trio of gangsters to a point that he rather commits
suicide than taking any more torture and Natalia is hospitalized.
Then the three gangsters think Javier has the money and try to torture
it out of him, heck they don't even shy away from threatening Bea just to
make him talk ... until Javier finally admits to having the money - which
he of course doesn't have - and promises to bring it in 24 hours time, but
only if they get him a fall guy to take the murder rap ... which our
gangster trio happily agrees to.
But when Javier is supposed to hand over the money, he has found a way
to play them against each other, and ultimately makes each of the
threebelieve one of the other two has the money - and eventually, it all
culminates in a shoot-out only Javier survives. And since he thinks that
one of the gangsters had the money anyways, in his mind justice is served
... that is until he stops by Alicia and her parents and finds a checkered
jacket, just like the one the only eyewitness who could relieve Javier so
far, has described - and suddenly it dawns upon Javier: the real killer
wasn't either of the gangsters at all, it was the deceased's own father
(Paco Hernández), who could never come to terms with his boy's
homosexuality, and Alicia, the woman Javier has almost fallen in love
with, herself, who always blamed her brother for being a cripple, and the
two of them wanted the money for what their son/brother had done to them,
even if it meant killing him and ruining Javier's life ...
On a story level, Equis is nothing short of brilliant, a totally
logical murder mystery that is still full of unusual and unexpected
plottwists, full of tension and suspense, and that has one guessing to the
very end. On the other hand though, the direction of this film is rather
flat and uninspired, no attempt is made to make the film into anything
special in that respect. That said, the film as a whole is still a high
class and highly entertaining murder mystery and is definitely
recommended.
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