No subtlety, nothing below what meets the eye here. Details of dénouement could have been different, though not necessarily better, but those who bear criminal or moral guilt are obvious from the get-go. The background conflict of adultery is hackneyed from countless movies, and the storytelling straightforward. Some takes actually done in another country, the quite unusual location of Ecuador could have been anywhere: the cast is Spanish-language international (only Colombian-born, Queens, New York-raised John Leguizamo had to work on his accent, through Telemundo and Ecuavisa), local color figures but not so as to overwhelm, and legendary corrupt police brutality is absent, with the head of the official investigation “the only honest cop in Latin America.”

But Crónicas -- untranslated but “Chronicles,” probably not the feminine plural adjective, “chronic” -- is good of its kind and in combination goes beyond both its bases, fashionable serial-killer thriller and the equally current consideration of oxymoronic media morality. Personality duality already touched on in his 1998 feature début, Ratas, Ratones, Rateros/Rats, Mice, Thieves, Ecuadorian but French- and US-schooled director/writer Sebastián Cordero found his theme for deeper probing in three gory true cases, those of two earlier psychopaths in his homeland and a more nearly contemporary example to the north, in which a Colombian wife was floored on learning of her good husband and good father’s three-hundred fifty murders.

Not all of the film’s one-hundred-and-fifty cases of rape, torture and mass common burial of young boys and girls are “solved,” and some of the atrocities have been committed outside, in bordering traditional enemies Colombia and Peru. At the funeral for a slain child, a pan-Latin television crew manipulates mourners for more effective coverage: Miami’s infotainment Una Hora con la Verdad/One Hour with the Truth star reporter Manolo Bonilla (Leguizamo), producer Marisa (Madrid’s Spanish-English Leonor Watling), and cameraman Iván (US-reared Mexican José María Yazpik). Too much exposition comes through too many cell phone calls, but as they bicker long-distance with Marisa’s jealous newscaster husband Victor Puente (Alfred Molina), a rusted pickup truck strikes and kills the grieving parents’ other child at the walled cemetery gates.

His son Robert (Luiggi Pulla) scampering to find pregnant mother Esperanza (Gloria Leiton), the driver is yanked from the vehicle by a mob, beaten in the mud and twice soaked with gasoline and set afire by now double-bereaved father Don Lucho (Henry Layana). Manola first gets his footage and then intervenes to help Esperanza and police rescue the bloody victim. This soft-spoken Scripture-citing catechism and Bible salesman, Vinicio Cepeda (Mexico’s Damián Alcázar), is arrested for the accident and vaguely in connection with the serial murders, and jailed along with his attacker Lucho.

In the filthy local lockup, dispassionate Manolo talks briefly to both men but narrows his focus to Vinicio’s hints of intimate knowledge about the “Monster of Babahoyo,” which he will trade for favorable coverage of his own unjust treatment. Jealous of his source, and determined to add to his already considerable celebrity, Manolo jockeys with the insinuating accused man, the two like cardsharps leery of showing their hands too early.

Access to prisoners is casual, so the interviewer’s many cat-and-mouse sessions with his informant are not a puzzle. However, how he manages them, and also to dig up and re-inter another unfortunate child, both under the unhappy unknowing nose of Captain Bolívar Rojas (Ecuadorian film director Camilo Luzuriaga), is not at all clear. The star journalist’s immorality is too facilely inserted in his having cheated on his former wife -- “not why we separated” -- and now having a trite liaison with another’s wife. The actor’s face a bit much on the ethics vs. ego crisis, he -- and the viewer -- reaches unsurprising suspicions as additional facts come to light, but what is paramount in his world is not justice but spectacular news coverage.

Not that his two coworkers are admirable, either, for what gets to them is not the heinous nature of what they record --one’s own sweat overpowers the three-day stench of death --but their famous companion’s involvement with self.

News is not precisely fabricated as in recent real-life and film cases, though facts are hidden, not out of loyalty or honor but from a need to hog the rewards of celebrity journalism. In the end, Crónicas is less concerned with castigating the media, or considering the observer’s influencing or altering the observed -- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- or even a worldwide epidemic of pedophilia, than with the well-trodden tale of man’s divided nature, reduced to a good but not outstanding mystery. Whatever the interpretation, the two final scenes offer little hope, and no one comes off smelling good.

(Released by Palm Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)