‘A Widow’s Game’: How Terrible a Spanish Man-Eater Can Be

A Widow’s Game is a classic femme fatale story through and through. It is rooted in a real-life crime and reflects the Spanish film and television industry’s recent enthusiasm for adapting true crime cases.

The film is based on the case of the “Black Widow of Patraix,” which occurred on August 16, 2017, in Valencia. Antonio Navarro Cerdán, a 35-year-old engineer from Novelda, was brutally stabbed to death in an underground garage in the Patraix neighborhood of Valencia. Less than three months later, the police intercepted a phone call between two suspects. One was the victim’s widow, Maje; the other was her colleague Salvador from a geriatric rehabilitation center. With solid evidence in hand, both were soon arrested and convicted.

Drawing from court records, the filmmakers portrayed Maje—who began a new prison romance and even had a child while serving her sentence—as a calculating man-eater with extraordinary time management skills. To preserve and expand her network of lovers while securing a large inheritance, Maje psychologically manipulated the honest, infatuated Salvador over a long period, ultimately leading him to kill her husband for her.

True crime cases like this emerge every so often around the world. And in the history of cinema, femme fatale stories—whether original or adapted—are so numerous they could fill libraries. Famous examples that immediately come to mind include the noir classic Out of the Past from the 1940s, Sharon Stone’s iconic Basic Instinct, and Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale.

Whether due to the possible constraints imposed by law enforcement or the over-reliance on genre tropes, A Widow’s Game came across as unremarkable in both the areas of suspense and complexity. The police inspector in charge of the case, Eva, was confident from the outset that the pitiful-seeming widow was the killer. The only thing holding up the investigation was the red tape surrounding wiretap approvals, which delayed the resolution for nearly three months.

As for the performances, it was difficult to believe that the on-screen Maje could have seduced and controlled so many men. Of course, as the Chinese saying goes, “There is no wise man in matters of love,” and as viewers behind a screen, we can’t be too quick to judge someone’s allure. Still, I believe the real-life Maje was far more cunning and seductive than her portrayal in the film.

Not long ago, I met up with a close female friend who has played leading roles in many independent films in recent years. She told me she had just quit a film production that was filled with explicit sex scenes. “Honestly, I don’t mind stripping down for the camera or staging those scenes with clever blocking. You know me—I’m a man-eater,” she said with a grin. “But on the very first day of the shoot, I slept with the sound engineer—who’s still my boyfriend, by the way. The director couldn’t accept it. She felt that, even though it aligned too well with the character—who’s also a man-eater—it’d disrupt the working dynamics on set. So I had to quit.”

Of course, I have no idea whether the actress who played Maje in A Widow’s Game is anything like my friend who mirrored her character even off-screen. But what this middling film made clear once again was that the Spanish film industry remains deeply obsessed with dramatizing real-life crimes.

I attended last year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival and sat in on an industry panel themed “True Crime.” The speakers began with Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood, discussing how journalism and narrative nonfiction can be used as a foundation for creative reinterpretation. They expressed excitement at how the true crime genre has transcended film and expanded into television, literature, and especially podcasts. Notable examples included the series The Asunta Case, as well as popular true crime channels on Spain’s largest podcast platform iVoox, such as Crimen Ibérico and La Ruina. The award-winning podcast Forgotten: Women of Juárez—available in both English and Spanish—exposes the femicides along the Mexican border. It uses a mix of original audio and translated voice-over to heighten immersion. One speaker noted that podcast audiences in this genre are overwhelmingly female.

Perhaps the Black Widow of Patraix was herself a devoted listener to these podcasts—and she simply applied what she had learned when plotting her husband’s murder?

Interestingly, Spain actually ranks as one of the safest countries in the world (103rd on the 2023 Global Organized Crime Index, and among the top 20 countries with the lowest homicide rates)—aside from the high prevalence of pickpocketing in Barcelona. This gap between reality and artistic focus reveals how creators use crime adaptations to probe latent societal tensions—such as immigration conflict or judicial corruption—turning them into a cultural scalpel for dissecting contemporary life.