Opinion.

A Spanish TV series (six episodes), The Snow Girl, now streamable, is a gripping tale of the abduction of a child, Amaya Martin, five, who is taken when she is but momentarily unwatched by her parents during a nighttime crowded street celebration of The Cavalcade of Magi in lovely Malaga, Spain, in 2010. An outraged young woman journalist, Miren Rojo, herself a rape victim, and relentlessly shadowing (if not interfering with) the police investigation following Amaya’s disappearance, pursues the mystery of the child’s abduction. Miren cannot help herself.

The film is based on the novel by Javier Castillo.

The story is superbly told in the film: It is a blend of (i) the classic police procedural, (ii) a drama of normal versus abnormal human psychology, and (iii) the ever potentially dark state of us natural selectees.

Novelist Castillo’s story allows the police work plenty of room to unfold in a more or less straightforward and most entertaining way, and in the film there are false clues likely to arise in your mind because the themes based on the primordial and on the sad occasions of human derangement, certainly to include the lethal variety, are backgrounded at first and gradually prevail.

The suspense near the end seems almost worthy of Hitchcock.

To say much more would be to act the spoiler of what is an intense and sobering drama.

I’ll leave you with this.

Novelist Castillo is a fine writer. Thematically, he echoes a view of Mark Twain’s.

Twain wrote delightful comedy. He also wrote fundamental and serious dramas about culture having to do with themes like The Open Road and Life in the Present: Huck Finn: on the open Mississipi with Jim and as Huck confesses, “I don’t take no stock in dead people” (meaning essentially Tradition and Dead Great Authorities going unheeded in an improvisational Here and Now).

But recall that Twain also said the following: “The damned human race.”

Keep that in mind about The Snow Girl. (And hail to Spanish actor Cecilila Freire.)