The Snow Girl (La chica de nieve) is a six-part Spanish language series based on Javier Castillo’s novel of the same name and chronicles the tale of Miren (Milena Smit), a young journalist who becomes obsessed with helping a family recover their daughter Amaya, who goes missing from a parade in Malaga in 2010.
The Snow Girl recap – spoilers –
The series bounces between timeframes and is full of intrigue and mystery, as Miren conducts a parallel investigation to the police with the help of veteran reporter Eduardo. Compelling and nerve-wracking, for five long episodes we question whether Miren can solve the riddle. And then comes the sixth episode (seriously?).
This may be our only real criticism; after hours of investment in the search for this girl, the whole thing ends pretty anticlimactically.
Amaya has been completely brainwashed and Iris is dead, but Miren is still somehow on the hook despite the fact that she’s solved the crime? Ok.
But that’s not to say the series isn’t great.
Atpica Films produced the six-episode thriller. Along with Smit and Villagrán, the series’ cast also features José Coronado, Tristán Ulloa, Loreto Mauleón, Julián Villagrán, Ral Prieto, Cecilia Freire, and Cristian López.
The Snow Girl
Streaming This Weekend gave The Snow Girl a project audience score of 80. As of this review, the scores have come back and The Snow Girl performed better than expected, landing an 82 percent rating with audiences.
Watching The Snow Girl, there’s this pregunta persistent, “How long until we find her?” But the search for Amaya is never-ending. Before it’s all over, almost everyone has lost hope and the parents are confronted with the unsettling reality that their daughter may be dead.
Worth watching and well-executed, The Snow Girl maintains suspense from start to finish. However, it might have performed better if the script included a little more oomph in the “need a change of underwear” department. Suspenseful, yes; thrilling? Audiences are mixed.
Review of The Snow Girl
The series begins as a mystery but quickly loses its way owing to a badly written screenplay and poor editing. There is an overabundance of flashbacks that appear unrelated to the main narrative, yet we never really find out why they were included. Other scenes bleed into the series at random, connected to events with no relation to the task at hand. And the audio and voiceover lack clarity to the point that they hurt the production overall.
Still, a superb job by the cast.
In comparison to Nordic mystery thrillers, The Snow Girl is unfinished. This kind of story is tricky to perfect on screen, so when there are dull or sluggish moments, they feel like an eternity. Instead of six episodes, this series might have done better with three or four. The sound is terrible, as is typical of many Spanish telenovelas, to the point that everyone comes off as if they are babbling incoherently. Overall, though, it’s worth taking the plunge. At the end of the day, Javier Castillo astonishes with a solid cast in his own version of Gone, Baby, Gone.
What about that last episode of The Snow Girl?
The last episode of The Snow Girl begins nine years after Amaya goes missing. Miren is interrogated by police before going to see Iris, the woman she suspects kidnapped Amaya. Iris ultimately takes Miren inside her home and the two converse; while Miren has her suspicions, she can’t be certain Amaya is present. Iris reared Amaya in the hills, away from the rest of the world, brainwashing her into believing she was her mother, even changing Amaya’s name to Julia.
In the end, the good guys win and Iris is dispatched, but Amaya never really takes full account of what has happened to her. She’s confused and unattached to her real parents. Again, not the most satisfactory conclusion (for some).
The episode concludes two years later, in 2021, with Miren reading about the case at her book launch and Eduardo joyfully watching on. Everything appears to have wrapped up, but someone isn’t finished with Miren, as she’s handed an envelope with the words “want to play” and an image of another missing girl.
Is this a new case for Miren? We’ll have to wait and see whether season two is announced first.
The Snow Girl holds a 6.9/10 IMDb Rating
Can we expect season 2 of The Snow Girl?
The Snow Girl aired on Friday, January 27, 2023, so additional episodes might appear as soon as early 2024 if the show is renewed for a second season. Having said that, the show’s future remains uncertain.
A second season of The Snow Girl would very certainly have to dig deeper into Miren’s personal history, particularly the sexual assault she suffered. We still don’t know who the perpetrator was by the conclusion of season one, and we can’t image Miren or the series showrunners skipping on this narrative should it return for a second season.
The Snow Girl is streaming now on Netflix.
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