Maybe its as a relation of a PI (a Pinkerton Man) or just someone steeped in noir, I find the reworking of the detective story fascinating. In Icíar Bollaín’s Mataharis the detective is no longer the tough loner, instead she is a searcher, at times disillusioned, but in control, or at least close to controlling, her private life. I say she because in Mataharis the detectives are three women, one a young devote to the detective arts whose only goal is to be a detective, one a mother coming back to work after having children, and one a middle aged woman, a veteran, who is in a loveless marriage. Most of the work the agency they work for does is following the lovers of their client’s spouses and, of course, catching them cheating. The work, though, doubles back on the women and each finds that what they do is not just a job, but a way of perceiving the world. The young one finds she can’t betray the strikers she’s been set to spy on, and she sacrifices her career for them and the leader who she has grown close to. The mother finds that her work makes her think the worst when her husband begins to act like he is cheating. And the veteran finds in watching the failures of others that her marriage one of habit, not love, is not worth keeping going. It is the interplay between the motifs of the detective, loner, cynic, and the women who have that edge in the sense that the everyday, the suspicious husbands, the failing marriages, makes them suspicious, and yet from those struggles they move on. If the motive of the typical noir detective is to survive, but live on, or so it seems, in much the same manner—the static existence of the hard boiled—Bollaín’s characters use the events to grow and change.