To the young journalist and youtuber Carles Tamayo came to see God when a monster came to see him. Specifically, Lluís Gros Martí, manager of the La Calàmbria cinema in El Masnou, where Tamayo screened his short films as a teenager. Gros, who had been sentenced to 23 years and eight months in prison for having sexually abused several minors, insists on meeting the journalist with the intention of getting him to pay him back. “It’s my life that’s up in the air,” Tamayo might have said, paraphrasing Lydia Bosch in Personal reasons. This is the starting point of How to hunt a monster, true crime from Amazon Prime Video, led by Tamayo and produced by Bambú producciones.
Often, when we talk about criminals of this caliber, we tend to dress them up with superhuman features that help us process their existence, when they are usually much more ordinary. This is the first success of How to hunt a monsterto show the chilling vulgarity of the paedophile. Lluís Gros is portrayed as a completely pedestrian type, even short-sighted and perhaps suffering from some dissociative disorder.
That supernatural quality that we endow certain criminals with also serves to try to justify their escape from our hands. We prefer to think that the criminal is very clever and not that society is very permissive, justice is defective, the police is clumsy and the bureaucracy is slow. Because the other success of How to hunt a monster It is a portrait of the impunity in which Gros lives, who, after a 12-year judicial process and a final conviction, was still able to walk around freely and contact teenagers, as we see him do in the documentary.
Gros could walk around freely, but he can’t anymore, because during the recording of the documentary series, an order for his arrest was issued, and thanks to Tamayo he was arrested, a vibrant climax in the third chapter. That arrest, however, was about to not happen and it made me raise an eyebrow. What would have happened if Tamayo, instead of keeping quiet about the fact that he was in contact with the fugitive, had communicated it to the authorities from the moment the order was issued? Fortunately, Gros is in jail. Once the initial shock of the terrifyingly everyday portrait of the pederast has passed, How to hunt a monster It not only leads us to ask questions about monsters, but also about hunters.
