Review: Donutil wakes up the ghosts of TV’s past in Secret Affairs – Seznam Zpravy

“We need a shovel,” Miroslav Donutil said seriously after hitting a tree trunk with suspicious scratches. When his partner digs up a human skull at the alleged site, Donutil once again has only to touch it and immediately see how the owner of the buried body died. This happens often in Secret Cases: The main character reaches for things and has visions. In the eight-part series written especially for him, he played a folk healer, or – to call one of the characters – “the most famous psychotronic in the Czech Republic“. But Jaroslav is not a fraud. The suspenseful music, the close-up of focused eyes and the vision of his thoughts show that he has very special abilities.

While the police, who Jarda sometimes helps with investigations, are skeptical about his talents, he finds an uncritical admirer in Pádraig, played by Martin, Donutil’s son. Although the two men ride the same “ezo” wave, they could not be more different in character. Morous Jaroslav does not say more than necessary. The smiling Petr, on the other hand, talks all the time. Usually about blood brides and dark forces. Their relationship brings a welcome relief to the sometimes heavy and pathetic series.

Klára completes the trio of amateur researchers. Sàra Donutilová plays the healer’s daughter. It might sound like nepotism, but the individual actors are well matched and it’s hard to imagine a better team for a series that is, at its heart, a family melodrama.

At the same time, it may seem from the outside that the subgenre of paranormal detective stories arrived in the Czech Republic twenty years ago, in which people who communicate with the living and the dead ‘ get to the bottom of crimes. TV screens were flooded at the beginning of the millennium, for the ninth and for a long time the X-Files The series Missing, Calling the Dead, Ghost Hunters, Medium, Messenger of Lost Souls or The Limits of the Impossible were to some extent as a reflection on the uncertainty of the times. With the advent of the Internet, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of conspiracy theories. Science, reason and traditional religion were no longer enough to reveal the truth “out there”. The world had become so chaotic and random that only the all-encompassing explanation of the secret teaching could be realized.

The feeling of mistrust in the institution, which has become even stronger in recent years, is also supported by Mysterious Cases. According to them, ghosts exist and telepathy is possible. However, Jaroslav and Petr do not replace the work of the police, but psychologists and social workers. At the end of the episodes, it is again shown that the cause of unusual phenomena, such as crop circles, is family trauma, domestic violence or someone’s loneliness. Although the tension with which each new revelation is presented promises several murders or government conspiracies, in the end it is “just” a domestic drama. At the same time, the explanations given are so vague and depend so little on the evidence collected that they are unlikely to satisfy lovers of classic crime stories. But it is not so much the fault of the series as expected.

Mysterious cases adhere more to the narrative principles of soap operas than detective stories. What is primary is not what happened, but how it affected the emotional connections between the characters. Many scenes do not move the plot towards a solution, but they allow us to better understand the web of relationships. The emotional impact of events comes first, not the chain of cause and effect. Today’s complex series demands a high level of attention and involvement from the audience. Mysterious affairs, transformed into a fragmented view, on the other hand, repeat everything several times and give us all the feelings not only with words and images, but also with emotional, mystical or expansive music. There is no danger at any time that you do not know what to think and feel.

In addition to redundancy and especially playing on emotions, the approach to female characters is also returning to the past. These represent either victims or objects. Sarah’s dress code is tight tank tops and crop tops. Basically, there isn’t a shot where her cleavage and exposed shoulders don’t draw attention. Secret matters is a modern series especially in terms of craftsmanship, which does not lag behind foreign models. The directors Lukáš Hanulák, Andy Fehu and Jan Haluza are able to create a mysterious, slightly terrible atmosphere and provide the scenes with Donutil touching people and things so much that you forget how funny their content is.

The effective rise and fall camera, critical sound effects and parallel editing turn Secret Affairs into one of the best looking and sounding Nova TV series. From a subjective point of view, on the other hand, such a favorable picture of an esotericist could appear as advanced. Jaroslav helps people completely independently and it is obvious that his methods work. In a country where, according to the Sisyphus society, tens of thousands of healers offer their services and where pseudo-science films about the mysteries of life and death are shown in wide cinema circulation, but this is not a courageous resistance to the dictates of rationality. . It’s just another demonstration of what the show does artistically on every level – catering to popular tastes and putting emotions over facts.