"(...) We find ourselves upon one of the best Spanish movies, if not the best released so far this year. This is a most successful film from a director who is developing into maturity. She achieves what is most difficult for any film: to create a fog of truth that envelopes the viewer from the first scene in a way in which any appearance of fiction dissolves during the hour and a half of its duration."

Miguel A. Delgado

LA BUTACA

"(...)This is another signature film from Icíar Bollaín, a woman who embodies intelligence and who possesses an admirable capacity to observe life and reproduce it adequately. There are no distortions or traps only an understanding of the characters, their reasons for being and acting the way they do. Bollaín displays both their miseries and their gifts, their emotions and vulnerability, their fears and uncertainties. She makes them ordinary and deeply human, releasing a feeling of truth and subtlety in situations, dialogues, gazes and gestures, in what they say and what they don't say. There is no falseness or pretension without an offer of a magic potion to alleviate their unease, doubts and sadness and to celebrate their courage as well their survival.

(...) Icíar Bollaín follows with a privileged eye and first class sensitivity, the sentimental, professional and family footsteps of three women who have made a living fulfilling the disturbing role of investigating the lives of others. They try to be professional and satisfy their clients, avoiding emotional involvements and with the right dose of morality, without any judgement of the predator or the prey. It also describes with strange authenticity the daily experiences of the detective. Scenes so ordinary, so normal: snapshots of their partners, their children, their foibles, their loneliness.

(...) Everything seems credible, spontaneous, problematic and complex in this excellent story with characters and scenes that smell of truth. It is impossible not to relate to it at any point. Even if the mirror does not reflect anything particularly comforting or flattering. Icíar Bollaín, as well as knowing many insightful things about human beings and telling them in an exemplary way, is also an actress (the disquieting sort!) who gets an unbeatable performance from her actors. 

(...)  it is a gust of fresh air, of intelligence, understanding and emotion. How just and clever is Icíar Bollaín, the clarity of what she wants to say, the precision of her language."

Carlos Boyero

EL MUNDO

"The diaries in our mobile phones, the email inbox, the records of recently viewed web addresses and the traces left by payments made with our credit cards, seem to conspire to make our times an age of absolute transparency. Each one of these tools is a stimulus for that natural tendency of the civilised man to entangle his own net of secrets and lies or to want to unravel his fellow man's net. The perverse elements of a utopian ‘Era of Transparency' have led to the shaping of an anti-utopian ‘Era of Distrust' in which we are already immersed. This is what Icíar Bollaín, the filmmaker and director, chose as the great subject for her fourth feature film.

Mataharis, a film with an extremely elaborate structure, takes the archetype of a private detective forced to turn away from tradition. Bollaín and her co-scriptwriter Tatiana Rodriguez make two changes to the typical detective genre. Firstly the film uses the atypical female gaze and secondly the film contrasts the characteristic darkness of this genre with the pedestrian grey of daily life.

The process of demystifying the characters is not what is at stake here, as the flawed characters have left so far behind the archetypal story that their only possible territory for adventures is in daily life. Hammett and Chandler knew that the detective genre was an excuse to talk about other things. Icíar Bollain can afford to forget the excuse itself to orchestrate an inquest of those invisible stories which define the essence of our present, but which perhaps need the functional glance of the detective to reveal a great narrative.

In Mataharis, fiction for the first time intoxicates the testimonial will of the director and leads to the precise choreography of slices of life. The balance between the professional and personal obligations, the ethical conflicts caused by the immorality of certain duties and the romantic shunning, among other topics, articulate an ensemble that has the good taste of seeming easy and light when it is quite the opposite.  Bollain, an innate narrator, has created a film that is alive and perfect. This is an ambitious piece of work but the viewer is surprised by the unusual magic of a film-maker committed to avoiding overreaching her merit. With acting akin to the perfection of music, it would be unfair to not mention the precise notes played by a cast headed by Najwa Nimri."

J.C.

El PAÍS