The Asunta Case : Refreshingly Realistic, but Still Insensitive Spoilers

I have a confession to make : I like true crime. For me, the genre is the definition of a guilty pleasure, given that it's ethically dubious at best, basically just exploiting real tragedies for the sake of entertainment. You can imagine how quickly that can go wrong. Still, I love the genre, so when I sat down to watch Netflix’s new true crime drama The Asunta Case, I was expecting more of the same. In the end, though I found myself pleasantly surprised. Sure, the show falls into some of the genre’s more common pitfalls, but I couldn’t get over how realistic it was - not in its depiction of what happened, but its portrayal of how confusing "what happened" can really be.

If you haven’t watched the show or heard of the case before, here’s a brief recap. In September 2013, a 12-year-old girl named Asunta Basterra was found dead by the side of a road in a small town in Galicia. Her cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation, though analysis showed that she’d been drugged not only the day of the murder but for the three months leading up to it. The murder quickly gained attention not only because of the girl’s age and mysterious death, though - she was also notable as one of the first Asian adoptees in Galicia, taken in by an affluent Spanish couple.

That couple, her adoptive parents, would later be found guilty of her murder.

I was young enough when the case happened that I’d never heard of it until I saw The Asunta Case, so I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what happened. There’s plenty of information available online. Surprisingly, though, I’d actually recommend Netflix’s drama as a decent starting point for anyone interested in the case. I normally find true crime dramas to be unrealistic and overdone, but like I said above, there’s one thing I truly admire about Netflix’s portrayal of the case : it’s confusing as hell.

By the end of the first episode, I was sure the parents had done it - but that certainty didn’t last long. By the end of the show, I honestly had no idea what to think anymore. There was tons of circumstantial evidence against the parents, ranging from blurry photos and unconfirmed sightings to mysterious drug purchases and inconsistencies in their stories. At the same time, though, there was no clear timeline - every version of “what really happened” where the parents killed Asunta felt far-fetched at best. Not only that, but some of the circumstantial evidence seemed so ridiculous that they actively weakened the case against the parents.

Most true crime shows tend to outright condemn the supposed killers, painting them as manipulative psychopaths or as having dangerous psychological issues. The Asunta Case, however, doesn’t make such strong claims. Instead, it doesn't try to cast people as heroes or villains. Each time new evidence came to light, the show pointed out all the holes in it, regardless of whether it made the parents seem more or less guilty. The result is a show that feels raw, openly admitting that it doesn’t have all the answers. Maybe the mother had a mental break (which seems most likely to me). Maybe the father was a pedophile on the verge of being exposed (less likely). Maybe the killer is still out there somewhere (who knows?).

The reality is that sometimes, like in this case, we’ll never know - and that level of honesty is refreshing in a genre that tends to like neatly packaged stories.

This isn’t to say that the show is perfect, of course. As much as I appreciate how it deviated from some of the genre tropes, it probably kept the worst one : dehumanising the victim. On the one hand, I can understand it. Anyone can be murdered, and the brutal truth is that most of the victims led rather ordinary lives before their deaths. Given that Asunta was a case of so-called "transracial adoption" and was raised in an environment where she was a noticeable minority, though, it feels like there was a lot that could be explored about who she was before her death. Ignoring that opportunity just came off as insensitive and disrespectful.

Even if there wasn’t any depth to add to her story, though, the show could have used her as more than a prop, because that’s what the character felt like, an object needed to tell the story. I'm by no means criticising the child actress who played her - I think she did the best she could with the weak writing she was given. But where other true crime shows might treat a victim as a prop for a scene or two, especially when dealing with serial killers, Asunta kept showing up to drift about and say a vague line or two. In the end, the frequency of her appearances just made it more obvious that the creators cared about her as a plot element rather than a human.

Still, not perfect is far from being bad. I can't say that the The Asunta Case is any more insensitive than any other true crime content, just that it's insensitivity is more noticeable. In fact, I’d even recommend The Asunta Case to anyone interested in true crime as an example of what more we could be asking of what is realistically a rather one-note genre. After all, one of the genre greatest strengths is the adrenaline rush that comes from the tension of a well-told mystery thriller, and if you ask me, nothing is quite as tense as knowing that you'll never know what exactly happened, or why... Or if the killer is still out there.