Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop recommends SHE WALKS IN DARKNESS (Agustín Díaz Yanes, Spain, 2025)

Susana Abaitua as Amelia

It’s the 1990s and the Basque separatist group ETA is in full swing. 

Operatives brazenly assassinate politicians, academics, police and high-ranking military by simply walking up and shooting them in the head. On busy streets, in cars, and crowded restaurants in broad daylight, location doesn’t seem to matter. Or they just blow things up.

ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or Basque Fatherland and Freedom) forms the backdrop for writer-director Agustín Díaz Yanes and his restrained, but always gripping and tense spy story.

Yanes inserts a fictional plot into this Spanish history with an undercover mole planted inside the ETA to discover the location of the group’s stash of weapons. 

(Andrés Getrúdix as the handler, Susana Abaitua as Amelia, She Walks in Darkness)

Recruited to infiltrate the group, Amelia (Susana Abaitua) is a member of the Spanish Civil Guard and a Basque language speaker. She stays undercover for many years.

Her new ‘legend’ includes a comatose ‘mother’ in a care facility; her handler is the Spanish cop Castro (Andrés Getrúdix); and her tradecraft involves communicating through Italian pop songs and switching garbage bags. She is planted as a teacher in a Basque high school, run by Begoña (Iraia Elias), a clandestine ETA leader whose husband is in jail on terrorist charges.

In its life span as a violent terrorist group (1968 to 2010), ETA killed over 800 including 340 civilians, and injured another 2,200. In more than 2000 attacks, the group carried out over 500 bombings, 456 shootings and 66 kidnappings (32 of whom were killed).

Yanes does seem more interested in espionage tradecraft than he is in ETA’s politics and we learn little about their motivations or why particular targets are picked. The copious use of newsreel footage from the time helps with authenticity, but it doesn’t provide much depth to our political comprehension.

And despite Amelia’s handler being accused of torturing ETA prisoners and being threatened with a trial, some commentators warn against being seduced by any film about the ETA seen from the point-of-view of the police.  

It’s an austere slow-burner and, despite its faults, should satisfy most le Carré admirers.