"Can we know the truth?"
Yes we can, and I'll tell you now - at least about Álex de la Iglesia's new movie, which fits to the series of the thousand times mentioned - and as I believe highly overestimated - new wave of Spanish cinema (and where the best try is still Sánchez-Cabezudo's Noche de los girasoles!). Iglesia, just as the other directors from contemporary Spain has the knowledge about how to make movies in the new millennium. They especially mastering the style, the way how to build atmosphere and tension, but as far as I see they have obvious problems to tell an otherwise well chosen story. They want more than they can cope, their incontestable cinematic talent is just not enough to translate a well written material to the silver screen (see here mostly Amenábar).
Guillermo Martínez's book (Crímenes imperceptibles, 2003) seems to be too big byte for Iglesia. Sometimes what is working in written form does not the language of the moving pictures. Or we might have not the real film director. But what kind of story we have here to bear? The plot sounds simple: we have a serial killer in Oxford (to avoid spoilers I have to formulate my review like this). Simple as I said - maybe that's why had the author and the director the drive to make it complicated. And usually here lies the problem of all these movies: the necessary complication of the plot kills the real story, but what is more apparent, the wannabe complexity kills the way of storytelling, the reasonable logic of the narrative. And that's the real serial killing in these contemporary films...
Iglesia has another "wise" movie, which uses but more exploits all the merits, unsolved mysteries and eternal questions of mathematics, phylosophy, language theory, physics and who knows what kind of other sciences. It's kinda sad to see how these exciting thoughts serve an otherwise simple murder(ish:) story. I wouldn't say that I guessed right about the film's twisted end (at least 1 point goes for that), but my surprise doesn't mean that I enjoyed the outcome. On the contrary: if the very beginning of the movie cites Wittgenstein: "there isn't truth outside mathematics" - then I really expect something more hidden, unsolved, abstract ending than a clear and "aha" explanation what we finally got. Sometimes leaving something open gives more than close it for one single "truth". Chance is sometimes stronger than a sober logic. After all:
"It's always possible to find a rule, a justification which allows a series to be continued by any number. It all depends on how complicated the rule is."
To accept this otherwise undeniable rule is the problem with The Oxford Murders, and all the contemporary "wise" films.
5/10
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