Southern Storm

Jorge Villafañez is a rotund, veteran private detective living alone in a high-rise apartment in Buenos Aires. Discreet and meticulous, he has a knack of making people open up in conversations. But when a new assignment puts him on the trail of Elvira, an experimental choreographer, the distance between the observer and the observed begins to collapse as Jorge descends into the rising waters of the Delta del Río de la Plata. Adapted from Juan Sáenz Valiente’s eponymous comic book, Daniel Casabé and Edgardo Dieleke’s La Sudestada sets out like a riff on Vertigo (1958), but snakes like the Plata River to find its own path. Employing unusual edits, archival footage, surreal interludes, delightful genre shifts and passages of gestural abstraction, the film is a shape-shifting work that constantly reinvents itself and opens up into new directions. Powered by a stellar lead performance by Juan Carrasco, La Sudestada endears us to Jorge even as it lets us glimpse his nastier side and horrific professional history. An unassuming reflection on age and urban loneliness, the film gradually accrues a spiritual dimension in the way it enables grace to manifest in a body fundamentally unprepared for it. The result is a thriller that tracks the movements of the soul. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)