Miracol (2021)

Cristina, a seemingly distraught 19-year-old novice, desperately tries to reach someone using one of the sisters’ phones, then leaves her convent by taxi for the hospital. There, she enters an obstetrician’s office. We gather that she has come to have an abortion. On leaving, she goes to the police station and asks to speak to an inspector, who is on leave at home. In the next scene, she asks a woman for a certain Dr. Ivan, and the woman tells her there is no Dr. Ivan in the building. Is this the police officer’s apartment, where she expected to find him? Was he the person she had been trying to reach? As the woman offers to make inquiries, Cristina flees the building. Her taxi driver has arranged to meet her later, at five o’clock at the station, but she gets into another taxi, whose driver she almost strikes up a rapport with. Pretending to find her a suitable place to change, he takes her to an isolated spot, where he rapes and brutally beats her. The story then follows Marius, a short-tempered but energetic and stubborn young inspector who is soon to be promoted, as he begins the investigation. He goes to the convent to gather clues but meets with silence or lies from the residents, who want to keep their convent apart from the world’s turpitude. An anticlerical man, the inspector presses on ruthlessly, obsessed with the idea of pinning the crime on the suspect being held at the station. However, he will have to release him six hours later for lack of a confession or evidence. Marius returns to the crime scene and falsifies it in order to ensnare the man he is plainly convinced is guilty. We then see him questioning the obstetrician, who tells him that Cristina ultimately decided against having an abortion. Both mother and child miraculously survived. Relentlessly, Marius shows Cristina photographs of the suspect, but at first she retreats into silence. Marius tells her he will act as though she has identified the rapist. She then takes his hand and whispers something in his ear that we cannot hear, after which they kiss passionately. Marius promises to see that justice is done for her. Increasingly consumed by the case, he arms himself with his pistol and, outside all proper procedure, decides to take the suspect to the crime scene with the help of several colleagues, intending to force a confession out of him. During the drive, Marius begins to harass and rough up the suspect; in the process, the audience learns that he really is the culprit. Near the deserted bridge where Cristina was raped, Marius is seen wetting his face in the river, then his colleagues call him. Over the van’s radio, an announcer gives the time as five o’clock—the same time as Cristina’s appointment with the taxi driver she never took. Rejoining the group, Marius makes the rapist believe that Cristina has died of her injuries, then beats him and finally manages to get him to confess. Marius then kills him. We see Marius wetting his face again, as if in a loop, and understand that the entire final scene with the culprit was only a figment of his imagination. But reality partly catches up with his fantasy when the hospital calls to tell him that she has died. This time, he really rejoins the group and has everyone get back into the van. Since the imagined scene has the culprit confessing details the inspector could not have invented, we can suppose that Cristina told him the details of her ordeal in his ear. Before receiving the hospital’s call, had he in fact planned to make the suspect confess and punish him? (These are Marius’s last words to Cristina.) Does Cristina’s death make his desire for revenge futile? The police officer had been told that Cristina’s physical condition was fairly good despite her trauma. Did she take her own life? The film does not provide all the answers. The final shot shows the doctor who shared the taxi with Cristina on her way to the hospital, apparently about to perform an autopsy. She believed in heaven; he did not. She had been desperately seeking salvation through God, while he declared that no salvation was possible, either in heaven or on earth. In the taxi, he had indulged in a few bitter tirades against the illusions spread by the Church. At the end, the film shows him reunited with Cristina in the cold reality of death, about to open the young woman’s body, without thereby uncovering all her mysteries. Cristina’s deathly pallor gives way to a black screen, just after a tear slips from her eye.