Rojo

From pitch black to pampas beige by way of blood red, Benjamín Naishtat’s trajectory of mining the corrosive political ills of his native Argentina is filtered through the optics of genre that, while playfully plastic, resonate with caustic effect. The stark brutality of ’s (2015) noir-Western tale cedes to a more nascent touch of evil in , whose morally fetid parable is disguised by a ’70s telenovela aesthetic, just as a post-Perón generation might have been inured to the insidious advent of amid certain middle-class complacency. The nondescript home in an unnamed Argentine province, circa 1975, that appears at the film’s inception is slowly revealed to be not only vacated but actively ransacked, its contents randomly looted by neighbours while its residents’ whereabouts are left to haunt the imagination. Such is the nature