Netflix describes the new Spanish drama The Gardener as a “romantic thriller”, which makes sense when you really take a look at it. It’s a thriller because it involves a young man who doesn’t feel emotions and kills people for a living all of a sudden falling in love with a woman who is supposed to be his next target. That sounds like a romantic thriller to us.
Opening Shot: A shot of waves crashing. A pickup truck drives up to the shore, and we see a man getting ready to swim in the cold water. Suddenly, someone comes up behind the man and injects a green liquid into his neck; the man loses consciousness and dies almost instantly.
The Gist: “My Elmer,” says La China Jurado (Cecilia Suárez) in a voice over about her son Elmer (Álvaro Rico). She goes on to describe the traumatic head injury he suffered during a car accident when he was six; as a result, Elmer can’t feel emotions. At one point, China was a successful actor in Mexico, but has raised Elmer on her own in Spain. Her goal is to buy her parents’ house in Mexico and move them back there.
As China says, Elmer’s inability to feel emotions is convenient for some things; while China and Elmer run a gardening business and nursery, their side business entails Elmer being a hired killer. Elmer, whose life has been devoted to horticulture, concocts a poisonous serum from his plants, coldly injects it in his victims, then buries the victims in his award-winning garden, providing some effective fertilizer for his plants and flowers.
When the swimmer’s disappearance is reported, Pontevedra police detectives Torres (Francis Lorenzo) and Carrera (María Vázquez) are flummoxed by the fact that the body hasn’t been discovered yet. While Torres thinks it was an accident, Carrera is curious about why the swimmer’s possessions were so neatly folded, and other quirks.
It turns out that the man’s wife paid China to kill him, so she and her son can finally end the abuse he subjected them to. Another potential client, Sabela (Emma Suárez), comes to the nursery to pay China to have a young woman named Violeta (Catalina Sopelana) killed; she’s convinced that Violeta is responsible for her son’s untimely death. The money she’s offering will be enough to let China buy the house in Mexico, so she and Elmer can leave Spain for good.
Elmer finds and follows Violeta, but after passing out on the street, he wakes up to Violteta standing over him. He starts to feel something for her. In fact, he realizes that he starts to feel things in general for the first time since the accident. And the feelings he’s developing towards Violeta is going to make it really hard to kill her.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Gardener is a little bit Bates Motel, a little bit Dexter, and a little bit Pushing Daisies, without the latter show’s tweeness.
Our Take: The Gardener, created by Miguel Sáez Carral, is a lot more melodramatic than the first few minutes of the first episode might make it seem. It has all the elements of a show that’s going to go to some dramatic extremes, from Elmer’s brain injury — and how it somehow miraculously heals itself almost two decades after it happened — to his love affair wit Violeta to his too-close relationship to his mother. However, Carral manages to put some of the more outlandish elements of this story into a context that’s grounded enough in reality to make the show very watchable.
We get a glimpse of Elmer as a kid post-accident, with China teaching him how to fake certain emotions in order to fit into society a little better. But we’re pretty sure that Elmer never completely fit in, and even though he didn’t feel emotions, there must have been some sort of visceral discomfort that’s ruled his life. That’s why he turned to horticulture, where plants don’t judge you and just grow if you do everything right.
What we don’t get to see, at least not in the first episode, is how China and Elmer started running a contract killing side hustle. For the sake of the story, we hope we get a glimpse of how it all started, especially because it seems that China was able to somehow convince Elmer to do it, taking advantage of the fact that he can’t feel anything.
We also hope that his newfound ability to feel things won’t only come through in his love for Violteta. This is a guy who probably barely remembers what emotions were like, so seeing him experiencing them for the first time in decades should seem strange and surprising to him.
The story seems like it’s going to end up with Elmer going against his mother, as China wants the payout involved in offing Violeta, so she may take matters into her own hands even as Elmer gets in deeper with his first love. If that’s the case, it’ll be fun to watch, given how unnaturally close their relationship is at the beginning of the series.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Elmer and Violeta kiss, while Elmer still has a syringe with his poisonous serum in his pocket. Let’s just say he now has lots of conflicting feelings going on.
Sleeper Star: For some reason, Lorenzo and Vázquez, as Detectives Torres and Carrera, have their own story going on, with Carrera thinking that Torres has a thing for her, despite the fact that he’s married.
Most Pilot-y Line: Carrera jokes with Torres that he must have been traumatized by Jaws when he was a kid, which seems impossible until we realized that Jaws was 50 years ago. That just made us feel old.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While there are a lot of absurd elements in The Gardener, the elements are grounded enough in reality to make them seem plausible. And the more plausible this show seems, the better it will be.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
About The Author
Discover more from imd369
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
