Dir: Benjamin Naishtat | Thriller 99’ 2026
Glaxo: Another Seething Noir from Argentina’s Dark Past
Argentina’s twentieth-century history offers fertile ground for filmmakers, with its turbulent politics, buried traumas and shifting allegiances. In Glaxo, Benjamín Naishtat, whose Rojo excavated the moral rot beneath respectable surfaces, returns with another brooding, elusive noir.
Set in the 1950s, the film depicts a society simmering with tension, fragile loyalties and concealed violence. Rather than explain its characters and conflicts, Naishtat lets fragments, encounters and suggestive details accumulate, leaving the audience to piece together the relationships and motives, an approach that rewards patience but can also feel uncertain.
Visually, Glaxo creates an oppressive world where ordinary life carries ominous significance. Its period setting frames a society suspended between public respectability and private corruption, while Naishtat uses withheld menace more effectively than explicit violence. The atmosphere often speaks louder than the dialogue.
The performances sustain this unease. The cast conveys restraint, resentment and psychological ambiguity through pauses, expressions and subtle behavioural shifts. These characters carry histories they would rather conceal, making their silences as revealing as their words.
The film’s ambiguity, however, sometimes becomes an end in itself. Its scattered clues can be absorbing, but they also create emotional distance, leaving viewers unsure whether they are encountering deliberate mystery or narrative obscurity. Greater clarity might occasionally have strengthened the drama without diminishing its intrigue.
Still, Naishtat’s command of tone is impressive. As in Rojo, he links personal cruelty and betrayal to a broader culture of moral compromise, placing the individual and political within the same poisoned atmosphere.
Glaxo is an unsettling addition to Argentine historical noir. Though it can demand more interpretive effort than desired, its atmospheric direction, compelling performances and pervasive menace linger. Not every mystery resolves, but the film’s shadows prove more haunting than any neat conclusion.
TIFF WORLD PREMIERE | BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL