Refúgio do Medo
Episode List
How did this collaboration came up? It’s spoken in three languages at least: Portuguese, Icelandic, and English to cross the language barrier.
See Causa Própria for something more interesting.
S01
Basic thriller setup. A woman was killed, and whoddunit?
Ah, the music quotes from Dulce Pontes, but they chop it up to try and hide it.
There’s some funky ADR in some places, most exterior shots in the wind, that’s understandable with what I imagine is almost no budget.
The woman that plays the local cop, from the small town, clearly saw Fargo, she’s always so nice and polite, while at the same time forceful in her investigations. Incredible performance. But she’s a stand up comedian, what the hell!
S01E01
The protagonist has to be the dead woman’s teenage daughter. They live in Iceland, but not even Reykjavik, some bumfuck island, with a fish factory. They ran away from Portugal, her husband was seemingly violent, the way he talks to the grandfather, a local tax driver.
One of her co-workers was flirting with her, they seemed to have carnal knowledge (or at least they wanted to). He’s the one that found the body. Her friendly neighbour also works in the same factory.
As for her daughter, she made some friends, including a particular boy, who happens to be the son of the detective handling the case. They spend the night partying with hard drugs and booze, our protagonist was sleeping pretty hard. Said detective doesn’t even live there, she lives in the capital, the boy stays with his grandmother.
The detective is distant with her son, but back in the big city, she is friendly with the neighbour, a battered woman with a kid. Something wicked this was comes.
There’s also a local policewoman, being relegated to second fiddle. She resents having the “fed” snooping around, it could be her big break.
Who could have done it? The boy called the dead woman, for what purpose? Drugs? Fish?
S01E02
The cops start their investigation, there are not many answers. At the same time everyone was in the party hosted by a 30 years old guy with a criminal record, including the dead woman. That’s weird…
Even the protagonist does some sleuthing. While going through her mother’s things, she finds an envelope with a picture of her and “I Love You” written in a sharpie. After playing a bit of GeoGuessr, she finds the house that appears in the picture. She even sneaks in and finds a picture from the same shoot. The mother’s boyfriend is none the wiser.
The protagonist doesn’t lie when saying she never met her mother’s boyfriend, which never appeared before, she isn’t lying about that, seemed equally a surprise for her. Her father shows up, all contrite, saying he will stay for a while, but the protagonist doesn’t want that at all.
Turns out the friendly neighbour is the father’s sister. He was setup as some evil guy, but is being softened up now.
The main cop keeps the local cop in the loop, interviewing everyone. She tries to keep her son out of it, against the wishes of the local cop. It’s not easy, he is being a rebel teenager to her, but as far as the case is concerned, he is still a suspect.
They search the party location and find blood on a space heater, consistent with the autopsy. The main suspect is either the party organiser, or his brutish blue collar father.
Then the bomb drops: it seems the dead woman sent a voice memo to the main cop, about the relationship between their children. This is truly personal now, for everyone.
S01E03
Suspects are like buses: you wait so many episodes for one, and then they all show up at once. Out of the blue, there are so many suspects now: the blue collar father of the drug dealer, the estranged husband, the boyfriend, and the main cop’s son. Everyone had the means, a reason, and an opportunity, but there can be only one (or it’s Murder on the Orient Express).
I like how the main cop keeps defending her son, someone who actively hates her guts, beyond reasonable doubts. The local cop’s face when she refuses he smokes is priceless. Finding bloodied clothes after that voicemail is just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
There’s also an hilarious small town scene: the teacher is invited for a “date” with the drug dealer’s father, a mature man. He only cares about interviewing her to get more information, and since she won’t give it, he scrams. Classic deviant behaviour.
Nobody cares about OPSEC, the main cop lends her phone to a suspect and he deletes the incriminatory voicemail. The local cop follows a lead that takes her to a Tesla that recorded our protagonist and her boyfriend meeting the dead woman on the fateful day, outside the drug dealer’s home. The woman also finds her husband cheating on her after 15 years of marriage, the cop has a small scuffle while selecting which of the cameras is active.
The protagonist’s grandfather also gets his ass to Iceland, to accuse his son in law of murder.
The protagonist also has secrets. We had already seen a glimpse of a big bag full of money, I guess she wanted to run away somewhere. The neighbour knows, she knew about the boyfriend. Our protagonist then calls her OG friend in Portugal, after months of being AFK.
Is this the main reason they went to Iceland in the first place? Running away from the father? But he then gets there anyway, from the early hours even. Something is fishy, and it’s not the drug dealer’s boat.
S01E04
That dinner party scene is incredible, everyone on top of their game. These Nordic people and their booze. The local cop doesn’t even say much, but instigates resentment close to the point of fisticuffs.
Everyone is so drunk, they just let it all out. The father of the drug dealer is pissed at the local cop for harassing his son, and at the main cop for not arresting the boyfriend. The teacher tries to appease him, without revealing her extra marital affair. The other woman is the one from the Tesla camera.
That extra marital affair was actually caught on camera, by the boyfriend. He hid the video on a gum pack. But when talking to the protagonist, he confirms he loved her, and is very nice. Kinda of mixed signals there.
He doesn’t say anything why the dead woman was so afraid and came to him, that’s the resolution of the plot.
The protagonist went to the boyfriend a but too aggressively. Then she gets there and points the shotgun at him, and even loads it! He was pretty chill, fir someone who was close to being splattered on a wall.
The drug dealer just leaves on a ferry and takes his passport, does he smell blood? I mean, besides literally, since the lab confirmed the dead woman’s blood was at the party location, on the space heater.
S01E05
Oh my, this is much crazier than I though. Everyone was lying all along. Pretty sure this was a drug deal gone wrong.
The protagonist and the friend from across the street were doing a drug deal with the other guy from the party. The main cop’s kid is probably aware of that too. That’s probably the source of the big bag of cash in her house.
With a dead woman, the cops are sniffing around, so our protagonist calls our Lisbon friend and asks her to smuggle some “food supplement”. She goes along with it, but the deal is botched, the sellers are spooked at this last minute switcheroo. The Icelandic guy was about to get shot, so they run off with the dope. The girl is spooked from getting shot at, but the guy is too hot, he gets cold feet and dumps the drugs on a bathroom. Poor Portuguese fish.
The protagonist stoles the video from the boyfriend, why be so aggressive to a meek guy. It’s got to bedroom-related.
The main cop’s son is not involved in both investigation: his buddy is smuggling drugs in his view, and a sweater with blood from the dead woman was under his bed. Getting naked (twice!) in front of his mother won’t save him.
S01E06
Now that we are fast approaching the final episodes, the protagonist remembers meeting her mother on the fateful party. She remember her drunken stupor, yelling at her, being cruel by comparing her to the abusive father, and pushing her into the space heater. That is the source of the blood in that sweater in the boyfriend’s house.
But the boyfriend doesn’t confirm this version. He gaslights her, this is explicitly mentioned too. Maybe he doesn’t fully remember either, but he goes to the police station willing to confess to the crime, to protect his girlfriend. Only his mother can talk him out of it.
The protagonist is also wearing some kind of spinal cord protector or whatever, it seems her father’s violence manifested itself in more than just words.
The drug plot is at least “solved”. The guy that got cold feet is spooked, his local handler (the barmaid, friend of the dead woman) is breathing down his neck, but he runs away. He’s got bigger fish to fry anyway, his father is close to a mental breakdown. The boat owner says good bye, cruel world. The guilt over having as sex tape being circulated. No word on the teacher, the other person on said sex tape.
The main cop goads a “proper” statement, but he just distrusts the police. Then he gets more drunk, and tries to talk to his nemesis, the guy recording him.
But the big revelation is that the local cop was taken advantage of by the main cop’s father a couple years go. He was the police chief even, a big wig, what’s she gonna do, accuse him? This is before #MeToo. The main cop notices she was being a bitch, and perhaps evaluating her own life too…
S01E07
The “accident” that lead to the injury our protagonist suffered is pretty goofy, it doesn’t really fit the tome of the rest of the show. Could have been implied only, no need to attempt to pull a The Da Vinci Code.
The father was directly responsible by the accident it seems, maybe it was an attempt at suicide while taking the girls with him. Either way, he should be barred from interacting with his family.
The teacher doesn’t admit she knew (carnally) the guy from the boat, now he killed himself. She wanted an affair, but it seems he wasn’t really into that. A simple fuck boy.
The main cop’s son is finally interrogated by the local cop, and she makes him talk about the bloodied shirt. She even has surveillance footage. This happened very fast, when out protagonist cannot influence the result, she arrives late for her son yet again.
Finally the reveal who met the dead woman in a white rental car: it was the Portuguese neighbour all along, the drug money launderer. Was she the mastermind all along‽
S01E08
Oh lord, it’s worse, it’s a Gainax Ending. Absolute insanity.
The reveal of the fateful night is that the dead woman found out her own sister was leading her daughter, the protagonist, to drug smuggling. Instead of admitting it, she comes up with a stupid excuse about medicines or something, ridiculous. When she confirms she will go the police, the sister, barmaid, and fish factory worker just smashes her head with a rock. The husband was in the car, it’s not clear if he was in on the drug smuggling.
In the present day, this is repeated, first as tragedy than as farce. The protagonist is about to kill her own father, she suspects he murdered her mother, but gets stopped in the nick of time by the the main cop and her (former?) boyfriend.
There’s a distant epilogue. The protagonist came back to Portugal with her father (the one who tried to murder her, and succeeded in abandoning her mother to die alone), but they buy the nice house by the ocean. The husband is openly seeing another woman very much similar to the dead one, the implication is that the cycle will restart.
The main cop’s son is dating again, hopefully checking that mythical Iceland app to avoid inbreeding, to check how much of a cousin the other person is. The main cop and the abused local cop are friends again, the main cop rejects the memory of her father, and so does her mother. This is extremely unusual, to say the least, you would expect some Stockholm syndrome from the older woman, even in a progressive society such as rural Iceland.
Pretty much all other characters are dropped from the story like an ugly baby. Not even a reference, this is brutal. Absolutely bizarre.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.