The Snow Girl - Netflix Series

THE SNOW GIRL Trailer (2023) Milena Smit, Drama Series
Movie Coverage

Set in Malaga, Spain. Stars Milena Smit as Miren Rojo, the intrepid girl reporter and José Coronado as Eduardo, her mentor. We've seen Jose in a couple of other shows, notably Wrong Side of the Tracks.

This show has a whole smorgasbord of crime. We've got rape, murder, kidnapping, child pornography and suicide. The cops are trying, but there are not a lot of clues. The best part of the show is the emotions people go through. Our girl, Miren, was raped a couple of years ago and suffers from flashbacks and panic attacks. The parents are distraught over losing their kid. Iris is devastated that she can't get pregnant.

Synopsis:

Iris desperately wants to become a mother. She has been visiting a fertility doctor in hope of getting pregnant, but none of the doctor's treatments work. That evening there is a big parade through the center of town. The doctor, her husband and her six year old daughter, Amaya, are in attendance. The father takes Amaya to get a treat and while he is dealing with the vendor, a gaudy bauble catches the Amaya's eye and she slips away into the crowd. Iris spies the girl all alone and in her desperate misery takes the girls hand and leads her away. Her husband, Santiago, has serious misgivings about this course of action, but Iris is determined and he gets drug along. They manage to get away and take the girl home where they raise her as their daughter. It takes a while, maybe a year, for her to adjust to her new life as Julia, but adjust she does.

Naturally there is a big hullabaloo, big police investigation, canvasing the town, but nothing turns up. The cops find the girl's uncle has some kind of prior run-in with the law, so they drag him in. Turns out his wife has an empty apartment and when the cops search it, they find the uncle and his son have been making child pornography. Our heroine, the intrepid girl reporter, is talking to the son when he gets a a two second phone call and bolts. Our girl tries to stop him, but he throws her to the floor, runs out the door onto the balcony, leaps over the railing and plummets four stories to his death. The uncle goes to prison.

Six years later, the Iris makes a video tape of the girl, now 12, and sends it to Miren. This gets the investigation going again, but once again, whatever clues there are, there are not enough to track down the kidnappers.

Somehow the cops get on the track of a reformed child molester living in a travel trailer. Miren visits him and pays him 6,000 Euro for a list of aliases of people who visited a child pornography website. Later, the uncle gets out of jail and when he visits the child molester, Miren photographs them together and publishes the photos on the web with the implication that one or both of them is a rat and is talking to the police. Predictably, they are executed and the trailer is burned.

Meanwhile, out at the remote farm where Iris, Santiago and Julia are hiding out, an agent from the bank pays them a visit to remind them that they have missed a mortgage payment. Iris, fearing she has been found out, shoots him with a shotgun and kills him. Later on, the cops come by looking for him. Santiago plays it cool, invites them in, yes he was here, then he left, no idea where he went. The younger cop notices height recording marks on the wall, but doesn't make anything of it. They aren't looking for a kidnapped child, they are looking for a missing adult.

Santiago has reached the breaking point. He drives into town and sits in his car trying to get up the gumption to turn himself in. He is so distraught that when he finally gets out of the car and crosses the street to go to the police station he steps in front of a speeding car that runs him down and kills him.

Iris makes another tape and sends it to Miren. Miren notices that this video is better quality than the last one. From the pattern of magnetic fields laid down on the tape, the resident wizard deduces that both tapes came from the same model of video recorder. Since the video on newer tape is better quality, we might surmise that the machine has been in for repair, and since VHS machines are few and far between these days, there's only one shop in town that would perform such a repair. Our girl visits the repair shop and finds the owner uncooperative, so when he is distracted with another customer she steals the ledger and runs off with it. From this she gets Iris's address and heads out there to pay her a visit. The visit goes off well enough, or as well as you could expect when visiting a rural recluse, but it's enough to panic Iris. 

Miren leaves, but then hides in the weeds a short ways down the road and waits. Eventually Iris bolts with Julia, their luggage, and the shotgun. Our girl follows them with her lights off, but Iris makes her and stomps on the gas. So now we're speeding down the road in the driving rain and Iris is losing her mind. She unbuckles her seat belt and drives the van through the guard rail. She is tossed through the windshield, the van slides down the hill and rolls over. Iris is dead. Except for a few scratches, the girl is unharmed. When Miren confronts Julia, Julia pulls out the shotgun, and when our girl persists, Julia fires catching Miren in the shoulder.

Julia is reunited with her parents, but she's not having it. We expect she will readjust, but it might take awhile.

P.S. The title comes from the 'snow' that shows up on the video screen after the clips of the kidnapped girl have ended. The TV show is based on a novel. In the show, our girl, Miren, spends ten years looking for this girl and then writes a book about. The last scene of the show has her reading a passage from her book to a small crowd gathered at a bookstore, and in this passage she explains that she often felt like the kidnapped girl was lost in the electronic snow.