Quite by accident, I stumbled upon the first episode of a great miniseries.
Everybody smokes and nobody calls for backup. That is an apt description of Epitafios, a 13-part miniseries that showed on HBO Signature.
But it is so much more. It has to be because it is in Spanish with English subtitles. That may turn you off and, if it does, you are missing one of the best crime dramas ever. In fact, the story is so compelling that you don't even notice the fact that it is subtitled. The acting, the music, the story will grab you like no other crime drama.
I like Tom Shales of the Post's description: Epitafios" is as gripping as its murders are ghastly, a spiraling reverberant circle of horrors that keeps widening as the bodies pile up (more than two dozen killings by the time the series ends) and the killer's motives become clear, if perverse. The film breaks rules in somewhat the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho": Hardly anyone in the cast seems safe from extinction and could become the killer's next conquest at any moment. No one is safe. One of the main characters bought it the first episode - when have you ever seen that happen?
This is a series that I lost sleep to see.
After five years, Julio Chávez and Cecilia Roth return in Season 2. I will have the same anticipation for each episode as I do for True blood.
