Santo is a Spanish-Brazilian crime thriller series, released on Netflix on 16th September 2022. The series is created by Carlos López and directed by Vicente Amorim. It is the first Spanish fiction shot between Spain and Brazil, produced by Nostromo Pictures. There are 6 episodes in total with a runtime of about 43-50 minutes respectively.
The cast of the series includes Bruno Gagliasso as Cardona, Raúl Arévalo as Millán, Victória Guerra as Bárbara, Greta Fernández as Susi, Maarten Dannenberg as Olin Hansen, Luiz Felipe Lucas, Iñaki Mur as Guillermo Alonso, Núria Prims, Judith Fernández and María Vázquez as Arantxa.
-Santo Review Does Not Contain Any Spoilers-
It is a thriller series that sometimes resembles horror, with its occult elements. It tells the story of Santo, the world’s most-wanted drug dealer whose face has never been revealed. Two police officers who go after him, Cardona and Millán, are initially radically opposed, but they will have to learn to collaborate and understand each other in order to solve the case and stay alive.
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The series starts off with a note that the police have spent years looking for a drug lord who also performs blood-thirsty rituals, but nobody knows who that person or the cult leader is. And the episode takes off on a violent note right off the bat, as a man in a car is shot by two masked bikers, who abducted his son from the back seat and put the car on fire.
Here we are introduced to our first main lead officer Millán, who was connected to the person that got burned to ashes. But the person was a criminal drug trafficker and from there we know that Millán is not our typical law-abiding police inspector, but rather a corrupt one. Simultaneously, in Salvador, Brazil a decapitated body of a child with a missing brain is found in the sea.
It is said to be a typical sign of Santo’s work and urges federal officer Ernesto Cardona to infiltrate the gang of the aforementioned ‘Santo‘. A very complicated mission due to the great power that this unscrupulous criminal has. The fear of knowing that he may have him by his side, but he will never know who, instils an intrinsic fear, where the danger is latent at all times.
But the secret mission goes wrong as his cover gets exposed and cut to, months later we see Cardona in an abandoned factory in Spain, lying almost lifeless, with cut marks on his eyelids and no memory of what happened to him. Last he was seen with Barbara, said lover of the unseen crime lord and creates more mystery of what might have happened to them.
In terms of keeping up the suspense mystery about its unseen crime lord, the series is able to continue it, till the very last moment. The added layer of a satanic cult and its gory rituals add a dash of horror and fear to the story, which is otherwise a typical police crime investigation series.
There’s also an angle of revenge in the plot. Every character has a backstory and each person who is involved has their own parallel reasons for carrying out their work and going after such a fearsome criminal. With some seasoned actors involved in the project, the acting is certainly up to the mark with consistent cinematography.
Summing Up: Santo
The collaborative series is well packed with action and thriller but not without some major issues. The flashbacks and jump in the timelines without any labelling, are often confusing at times. But there are only 6 episodes and if you are still connecting the dots on what happened when, till 3-4 episodes, then it’s a storytelling error.
Also, the recurrent use of black fade-out disconnects the story, where some other transitions could have been used. While it is obvious that Millán and Cardona are the protagonists of the story, but the female cast feels like just props to help the leads get ahead. Also, considering the whole ending of the series, they could have sketched out their characters better.
And talking about the ending, I was honestly baffled and confused for the most part, as I had some hints about ‘this’ character being the unseen criminal but as the show progressed, they were out of the suspicion ground. But the revelation about its identity doesn’t sit right with me.
Santo is currently streaming on Netflix.
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I thought it was good in terms of acting, script, and production values, but there was some difficulty for me with the flashbacks. They did little to fill-in the blanks and more to confuse the progress. The talented two “featured” actors and their counterparts really lifted the whole experience all in all. The ending in my mind was anticlimactic and really not an ending at all…but rather an opening to possibly another season, which is not necessarily a bad idea.