Based on the Oscar-winning 2010 Argentine investigative drama of the same name, SECRET IN THEIR EYES tells the story of an unsolved murder that haunts those who looked into it more than a decade later for many reasons. The film is told in two parallel timelines, 13 years apart, but with the same players. In the older of the two, we meet Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Jess (Julia Roberts), who have both just begun their jobs as part of a Los Angeles-based counter-terrorism team, shortly after 9/11, so naturally they're spying on a mosque with closed-circuit cameras.
One night, they get a report of a dead body in a dumpster right next door to said mosque, and when they arrive to ascertain whether this is related to their investigation, they are horrified to discover that the body is that of Jess's teen daughter Carolyn (BOYHOOD's Zoe Graham). Although they should leave it up to the local authorities to look into, Jess and Ray also use their agency's resources to secretly track down leads, something the bosses aren't too happy with, since this means potential terrorist cases are going unworked.
The third member of their "team" is the new assistant D.A. Claire (Nicole Kidman), whom Ray takes an instant liking to, despite the fact that she's engaged. She's being pulled in different directions because she wants to help, but her boss (Alfred Molina) has been told that the prime suspect in the case is also a major confidential informant of fellow CT investigator and office asshole Siefert (Michael Kelly). "Breaking Bad's" Dean Norris plays Bumpy, a far more helpful set of eyes on the case, who isn't afraid to bend the rules a bit to get to this suspect. Naturally, the suspect is brought in, roughed up a bit, pretty much confesses, and then is let go when the needs of the country trump the needs of one mother to find her daughter's killer.
As the film begins, 13 years after those events, Ray is walking back into his old office, after leaving Los Angeles to take a job as head of security for the New York Mets. Some of the same faces linger, including Bumpy (chained to his desk after a workplace injury), Siefert (still an asshole), and Claire, who is now married and is the D.A. Jess is there too, but a little less so. It turns out that for the last few years in his spare time, Ray has been searching a database of mug shots, looking for the man who killed Carolyn, and he's pretty sure he's found him, recently released from prison, hiding behind a bit of plastic surgery. His guilt over the circumstances of the girl's death and the resulting screw-up with the suspect have never allowed him to stop searching.
SECRET IN THEIR EYES glides between timelines, watching the procedural efforts of the team to find this killer, and the subsequent search in the present day, which seems to generate a bit less enthusiasm from all parties than Ray would have imagined, including Jess, who now lives a life of isolation in a secluded home in the woods. While there are individual scenes and performance moments that play exceedingly well, the film as a whole is so faithful at key junctures, I question the need for the remake at all—and I say that as someone whose knee-jerk reaction is not to pan every remake. The one big change from the source material is that in the Argentine version, the Ray character is writing a novel about the case and returns to reopen the case for far more selfish reasons. But clearly writer-director Billy Ray (SHATTERED GLASS, BREACH) wanted Ray's motivations to be a bit more pure and less self-serving.
If you haven't seen the original film, the truth about and fate of this new/old suspect might be a bit shocking, but if you have seen it, then you already know where the film is headed, so a great many plot details and insane twists are going to deliver less of a jolt than they deserve. Still, the performances are solid, even if a couple of the emotional outbursts seem both actorly and would clearly impact the outcome of any case that might be built—Jess jumping into the dumpster with her dead daughter's body would destroy evidence; Ray pounding on the face of a suspect might be grounds for releasing him. As detail-oriented as the story can get, certain character choices don't make sense for smart people.
SECRET IN THEIR EYES maintain the atmospheric, rather chilly look of the original film, and that certainly adds to the overall creepiness of the work. But such an approach can also result in keeping audiences emotionally distanced from the characters, and sadly, that's the case here. You feel bad for their situation, but we're never given a shot at getting to know these folks enough to want the same things they do. It's a workable drama, and these are all tremendous actors, but it all feels like going through the motions of a great story rather than committing to telling it in a smart or interesting way.
