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Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben)

Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben)

Movie · 2018 · 12 people

The Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi wrote and directed Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows), a 2018 Spanish-language psychological thriller. A Spanish, French and Italian co-production, it is Farhadi's first film in Spanish. It premiered on 8 May 2018 as the opening film of the 71st Cannes Film Festival and competed for the Palme d'Or.

Laura lives in Buenos Aires with her husband and children. She goes back to the Spanish village where she grew up for her sister's wedding, and family and old acquaintances gather. In the middle of the celebration her eldest daughter is kidnapped, and nobody knows who did it. As the search goes on, tension grows between relatives and villagers and buried secrets surface. As in many Farhadi films, family ties and moral choices come under scrutiny. Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darín lead; Eduard Fernández, Inma Cuesta and Bárbara Lennie also appear.

Filming began in Spain on 21 August 2017 and ended in December, mostly in Torrelaguna near Madrid. Memento and Morena produced it. It opened in Spain on 14 September 2018 and in the US on 8 February 2019, to positive reviews.

DirectorAsghar Farhadi
Production companyMemento Films

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Inma Cuesta Inma Cuesta Actor · 46 years old Ana Saadet Aksoy Saadet Aksoy Actor · 43 years old Javier Bardem Penélope Cruz Ricardo Darín Eduard Fernández Sara Sálamo Bárbara Lennie Elvira Mínguez Ramón Barea Carla Campra Ricardo Ramos

Through different eyes

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Farhadi's strength has always been watching the relationships an event exposes rather than the event itself, and here too the kidnapping is less a thriller engine than a pretext for a family reckoning. With the wedding crowd as a setting and a circle of suspicion that keeps tightening, he tries to carry the moral dilemmas of his earlier films into a Spanish village. In my view the transplant isn't seamless: in his Iranian work every knot of the script rests on a specific social fabric, whereas here some of the secrets seem to exist to move the plot along rather than to carry dramatic weight. The heavyweight cast covers most of those gaps, and the result is a mature family drama, if not the director's tightest film.

Action & Thriller Fan Puts pace, tension and set pieces first; little patience for slow drama.

A kidnapping, a small village, everyone hiding something: on paper it's perfect thriller material. But go in expecting a classic crime story and you'll be surprised. The film keeps handing its momentum over to conversations and family arguments. If you want pursuit, chases or a race against the clock, it moves too slowly. It suits viewers who like moral dilemmas and have patience for slow-burn drama.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

What makes the film most interesting is that it puts at its centre the social fabric of a small village where everybody knows everything but nobody says it out loud. The distance between Laura, back from Buenos Aires, and those who stayed is not just geographical; old relationships and resentments resurface along with the kidnapping. Farhadi shows how quickly family solidarity can turn into suspicion in a crisis. The quiet tension between the one who left and came back and those who never left reads less as something specifically Spanish than as a universal small-town story.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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