‘The Truthers’ Netflix Review: A Small-Town Mystery Shaped by Conspiracy Obsession

Conspiracy thinking isn’t new, but it has expanded enough to become a defining trait of the present. I’m talking about the chronically conspiratorial—people who buy into any theory and cling to it with near-pathological intensity. The internet, and social media in particular, have supercharged this tendency—especially now that algorithms can manipulate and hyper-target what we see to an extreme degree. Research becomes confirmation; for many, the line between reality and fantasy, fact and projection, grows increasingly blurred. Since the pandemic—when isolation and screen-mediated life intensified—this mindset has spread across generations. In its own way, The Truthers is about exactly that.

The film blends procedural elements with family drama. The story is told from the perspective of Ruth (Stéphanie Magnin), a young Galician woman living in Berlin, where she works as a DJ. Her parents still live back home, but she’s largely detached, immersed in her own life. One night, after missing several calls from her mother while working, she finally gets one from her father the next morning: her mother has died. Ruth returns home to say goodbye—and to understand what could have happened to someone so young.

“She slipped in the shower and died,” says Martín (a terrific José Coronado), her father, a former Guardia Civil officer. The police agree. Ruth doesn’t buy it. They say her mother was drunk, but she didn’t drink—or at least that’s how Ruth remembers it. The photos of the body show an alarming amount of blood. And above all, her father behaves oddly: withdrawn, evasive, already having erased her mother’s phone (“She’s dead—what’s the point?”), and more concerned with finding a missing local boy than addressing what happened. Ruth grows desperate and suspicious. But no one seems to listen, especially in a small town where Martín is well known.

The Truthers begins to tip its hand through Martín’s increasingly strange behavior: he’s angrier, more volatile, and starts ranting about a conspiracy involving pharmaceutical companies, diseases, kidnappings, and other shadowy forces. Add to that the fact that he spends all day locked in a room, and Ruth has ample reason to think something is off. And these aren’t the only clues that lead her to suspect he may have had something to do with her mother’s death.

As a piece of investigative cinema, The Truthers doesn’t offer anything especially novel, unfolding with the same somewhat flimsy, procedural mechanics seen in many genre entries. What’s more compelling is how it gradually constructs a parallel between obsessions. The deeper Ruth digs, connecting one dot to another, the more the viewer starts to wonder whether she, too, has begun to operate under the same conspiratorial logic as her father—the cognitive bias that turns every ambiguity into confirmation. Is she uncovering the truth, or falling into the same paranoid trap?

Beyond the film itself, one might argue that the investigative thriller—across its many variations—is essentially a chain of conspiracy theories that, in fiction, often prove correct. Extrapolate from that, and cinema may bear some responsibility for conditioning audiences to believe that every tragedy must have hidden perpetrators, that there are always threads to pull if you dig deep enough. In both reality and fiction, it’s hard to accept that sometimes things just happen—by chance, without design.

Darío Madrona and Carlos Montero’s script doesn’t fully commit to that line of inquiry. Instead, it folds it into a fairly standard thriller that expands to include additional characters and subplots beyond the mother’s death. But its central concern remains intact. It could be a lonely retiree in a Galician village, a hyper-connected young urbanite hooked on social media, or anyone unable to maintain critical distance from what the algorithm serves up. The truth is, we’re all just a few clicks away from believing any conspiracy theory—and some are only a step away from acting on it.