This boisterous thriller, which is based on real events, is the most mainstream film to date from Argentinian director Pablo Trapero (Lion’s Den, El Bonaerense). The story of the well-connected Puccio family, which in the early 1980s used its links with the government to cover up a lucrative kidnapping business, this is told using the slick language of a Hollywood crime movie. Trapero negotiates with verve the uneasy juxtaposition between quotidian family life and something rather darker and more sinister. But the film’s driving force is Guillermo Francella: with his ice-chip eyes and subdued menace, he is chilling as the Puccio family patriarch Archimedes.
