Reptile Doesn’t Care About Its Mystery

The Netflix murder mystery starring Benicio del Toro applies a veneer of intricacy to a story without any. Photo: Kyle Kaplan/Netflix

Warning: This article discusses plot points through the ending of Reptile.

Reptile is a whodunit that never tells us who done it. How, why, when — these questions are answered, albeit very slowly, by the end of Netflix’s excessively moody new murder mystery. And we do learn the identity of the conspirators, plural, all linked by a larger criminal plot the detective will untangle. But on the matter of who actually killed real-estate agent Summer Elswick (Matilda Lutz), viciously stabbing her to death in the bedroom of an empty house, the film stays mum. Not important, apparently.

Of course, not every murder mystery needs to be an intricate, airtight affair — a puzzle worthy of Benoit Blanc, to name another sleuth at the center of a Netflix movie. Plenty of great detective thrillers fudge some of the details; Raymond Chandler famously confessed he couldn’t say who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. With Reptile, director and co-writer Grant Singer is plainly aiming for not just the style but also the uncomfortably open-ended quality of David Fincher’s Zodiac. You could call his refusal to show us the crime and name the perpetrator a form of homage to that brilliantly inconclusive procedural, a plot point it deliberately dangles.

What the choice really betrays, though, is a certain indifference to the mystery itself. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a thriller that deemphasizes the basic genre tropes — the clues and red herrings — to focus on something else instead. But Reptile applies a veneer of intricacy to a story without any; it makes a rather straightforward, even generic case of murder-as-coverup look more convoluted than it really is.

It’s toward the end of the movie that Singer’s imitation of a twisty web of policier intrigue moves from imprecise to downright lazy. By this point, lead investigator Tom “Oklahoma� Nichols (Benicio del Toro, who also co-wrote the script) has basically pieced together what happened to Summer. She had become entangled in a criminal scheme with her fellow real-estate-agent boyfriend, Will Grady (Justin Timberlake) — a plot that involved planting drugs seized through narc operations in Summer’s sale properties, then snatching the houses up for less money via a shell company after they’re legally forfeited. Burdened by conscience, Summer threatened to come clean to the authorities, so Will had her killed. (Again, who exactly did the killing remains undisclosed by the crawl of the credits, as does the fate of Michael Pitt’s character and the identity of whoever probably did away with him, too.)

Of course, those drugs had to come from somewhere. And the suspicious disappearance of evidence from police storage leads Tom to strongly suspect that Will had an accomplice on the force. It’s how he confirms this hunch that’s rather insultingly convenient. Attending a birthday party for his boss, Captain Robert Allen (Eric Bogosian), Tom wanders casually into the man’s garage and finds, under a sheet, a Chrysler — the same model of car that was spotted pulling into the driveway of the crime scene the night of the murder. That’s right: The dirty cop, head of his department, left a key piece of evidence linking him to a homicide in plain sight … in his unlocked garage … during a party to which he’s invited several other cops … including the detective on the case … who’s already indicated that he suspects foul play.

That this is basically the final piece of information Tom uncovers — the missing clue, the one that cracks the whole conspiracy wide open — is all a viewer might need to make their case against Reptile. It’s an obvious twist that depends on the bad guys behaving with utterly implausible carelessness, all but placing a smoking gun right under the detective’s nose. A murder mystery doesn’t need to be complicated or even totally believable, but we shouldn’t walk away feeling like the cop solved the case through some combination of dumb luck and stupidity on the culprit’s part. Maybe this convenient blunder would be less galling if Reptile didn’t proceed at a lizard crawl, stretching out the investigation to 136 very long minutes. At that runtime, haven’t we earned a knottier, more surprising resolution … or at least one that doesn’t hinge on such an apathetic cover-up?

Of course, the true apathy is on the screenwriters’ part. (Singer co-wrote the script with Benjamin Brewer and del Toro.) The overwhelming impression is that Reptile barely cares about its plot mechanics at all. It’s mostly an exercise in agonizingly sustained atmosphere, hitting the same note of ominous suspicion over and over again. It’s the kind of movie that affords someone eating lunch the same air of unsettling import as the discovery of a bloody corpse. The mystery is a pose, and a means to an end — an excuse to wallow in the aura of dark intrigue without paying that intrigue off.

The best that can be said for Reptile as a mystery is that its narcotic mood covers for a lot of sins, and even makes it look more complex than it is; it’s easy to zone out during its endless stretches of pregnant unease and become convinced you must have missed a crucial, complicating detail. To that end, leaving the actual murderer unidentified might be a smart play after all: It’s much harder to poke holes in an unsolved mystery.