Aquiles
2018 · 26m · Argentina
Directed by Rodrigo Malmsten
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
During the socioeconomic crisis of 2001, Aquiles's close friends gather to celebrate the New Year at the house of Ignacio, his partner. Several months after Aquiles's death, the group reunites in his house to pay a final homage to a great friend of them all.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the elegiac grief film to milk the death for sentiment—Malmsten refuses, instead making the real subversion a room full of people who loved him just... existing together in his absence. It's almost aggressively unsentimental about loss.
The formal restraint here—shooting the before and after in the same house, letting time and silence do the structural work—places Aquiles in conversation with the intimate ensemble elegies of contemporary cinema, a film that trusts negative space and repetition as its primary grammar.
The decision to frame both gatherings identically, letting the camera hold steady while everything else has shifted, is the entire film: one compositional choice that transforms what could be maudlin into something devastatingly precise about how absence rewrites a room.