El Angel (2018)

By CinemaSerf

Lorenzo Ferro really does deliver well here and is pretty convincing as the curly-haired, butter-wouldn't-melt, Argentinian lad (Carlos) who at the age of seventeen already had his parent's piano stuffed full of ill-gotten pesos. His childhood within a respectable family suggested nothing out of the ordinary til he went to school and met the charismatic petty crook Ramón (Chino Darín). He is infatuated, and there's pretty much nothing he won't do to get and keep his new friend's attention. When that starts to involve his having access to guns, and cars and drugs... The rest of the film is creatively augmented historical fact as this young man discovers violence is a route to riches and success, and that leads to killing and that - well the rushes of blood to the head are addictive. You really could imagine the character delivering the communion wafers on a Sunday and smiling at the babies, yet he was really far more adept with a pistol at eyeball range. His apprehension itself only served to further fuel his desire for acclamation. The media had him on every front page and every television station. He even manages to escape - but that, too, seems little more than a publicity stunt. The production is a bit rough around the edges; the attempts to imply some sort of sexual fluidity to Carlos don't work so well, and there's too much dialogue but Ferro's performance as man for whom taking other lives meant nothing was, I felt, quite sociopathically engaging.