In short: Wild Tales (2014)

Original title: Relatos salvajes

This anthology movie directed by Damián Szifron tells six tales in which mostly members of the upper bourgeoisie (or the stinking rich, as we cell ‘em around here) encounter extreme events that often drive them to rather extreme behaviour. For example one of the tales sees a woman (and the only poor protagonist) encounter the man who drove her father to suicide, her problematically helpful colleague suggesting she might want to apply some rat poison to his meal. Another concerns an architect and expert for the demolition of buildings getting really angry about…having to pay his parking tickets. Another one tells of the highly complicated business negotiations needed to buy one’s son out of hit-and-run trouble.

In tone, these stories tend to the highly sardonically and blackly humorous, usually leading the protagonists through a short series of escalating suspense set pieces of a cynical yet usually exciting bend Hitchcock would probably have approved of (and wished to have made his films in a time and place where he could have gotten away with some of this stuff). Szifron is technically highly accomplished, using the sort of slick direction you could imagine in a high class car commercial, quite consciously making the cynical and harshly satirical plots look sexy, which does at the very least produce the pretty satisfying frisson of a very well told, though pretty bitter, joke.

There is, quite obviously, rather a lot of critique of the bourgeoisie in the modern world involved, though the film’s cynical approach to the matter does leave this critique rather on the surface level, putting too much distance between audience and characters to get much more than entertained sneers as a reaction.

For my taste, the second half of the film is a bit weaker than the first one, the stories there going on a bit longer than the earlier ones in ways their set-ups can’t necessarily carry. Particularly the parking ticket episode is weak, chaining the viewer to a whiny, self-centred asshole for what feels like hours for way too little pay-off.


Wild Tales is still a fine, fun, film, at least on one of those days when one feels rather more misanthropic than usual.