‘Glaxo’ Review: Benjamín Naishtat’s Period Drama Revisits Argentina’s Dirty War In a Not-Quite-There Period Drama

Though handsome enough, the writer-director’s fifth film is a disappointment after his previous two films.

In “Glaxo,” Benjamín Naishtat once again considers Argentina’s history of state-sponsored violence. The writer-director previously explored the military junta’s 1974-to-1983 reign of terror in 2018’s blackly comic “Rojo”; this time, he goes back to the immediate post-Peron military reign of the ’50s. Adapting Hernán Ronsino’s short novel of the same name, Naishtat untangles the book’s complicated structure — in which the story is told from four different POVs at four different times and out of chronological order —for a (slightly) more streamlined drama about friendship and betrayal. (As the opening voiceover bluntly announces: “This is a story about betrayal.”) Despite generous production values and Naishtat’s admirably supple direction, this adaptation never quite fires.

“Glaxo” begins with a joke about its own potentially confusing nature. It’s 1984 and two old friends are sitting in a movie theater watching “The Terminator.” “This movie’s too hard to follow,” one complains, while the other explains how John Connor is on a mission from the future to fix the past; “Glaxo” turns out to be a riff on that same idea concerning a betrayal that can’t be undone decades later. Across three separate years filmed in three different aspect ratios, clarity about the precise nature of that betrayal slowly emerges.

1957: A fascist police officer and unshakeably macho Catholic for whom no authoritarian task is too dirty to execute, Ramón Folcada (Marcelo Subiotto) arrives in rural Chivilcoy with his stunning wife, “La Negra” Miranda (Lali Espósito). She immediately becomes a openly-gawked-at marvel for the local men, who gossip that she was a sex worker when Folcada met her. Among the lovestruck locals are four teen boys; one of them, Miguelito Barrios (Joaquin Bonadeo as a young man, Manu Fanego as an adult), begins an affair with her while also training Folcada’s horses.

The situation is precarious, especially since Folcada is both prone to jealousy and, given his work for the government, experienced in killing with impunity. Previously a meek philosophy professor in Naishtat’s “Puan,” here Subiotto carries himself with the threatening self-assurance of Robert De Niro in gangster mode. In the movie’s best scene, he lays into two Mormon missionaries, Clifton (Pablo Turturiello) and Mitch (Brunno Radaveli), who have no idea who and what they’ve walked into; it’s a moment of belligerent nationalism with a pleasingly anti-American edge. The movie gets a lot of humorous mileage out of the visitors’ atrocious Spanish pronunciation, but they’re more than comic relief and their fate is part of the film’s climax, which shifts gears from the opening segments’ period nostalgia and sporadic, uneasy comedy into the overtly tragic.

Reteaming with his “Rojo” cinematographer Pedro Sotero, Naishtat recreates small-town ‘50s Argentina, as well as Buenos Aires, and succeeds handsomely in doing so (while actually shooting in Brazil, a location chosen at the initiative of producer Rodrigo Teixeira). In general, “Glaxo” has a surplus of production design pleasures, including a centerpiece sock hop where the boys first spy La Miranda in 1957, but lacks erotic heat. Naishtat attempts to give the film a romantic charge with a score by Shigeru Umebayashi, who leans heavily into the florid histrionics of his work on “In the Mood for Love” for a similarly bold score, but the music is radiating energy that the film itself can’t match no matter how much Espósito smolders. The fact that she’s a grown woman sleeping with a teenage boy barely registers as in any way notable, and their couplings are quasi-comic.

Naishtat has previously moved from strength to strength, which makes this film’s underpowered nature a disappointment. After his more arthouse-oriented first two features, “History of Fear” (2014) and “The Movement” (2015), Naishtat made a swerve into populism with “Rojo,” a sleekly assured, blackly comic rendition of Argentina in the 70s. The underseen follow-up “Puan” (2023), examined the then-recent Argentine economic crisis from within the walls of academia, proposing that putatively arcane philosophical concerns could actually be the perfect political training to meet the present moment.

In both “Rojo” and “Puan,” this talented filmmaker took deliberate steps to meet audiences outside the arthouse and succeeded to an unusual extent without compromising his artistic integrity. Likewise, with “Glaxo” Naishtat has started from a difficult source and tried to make it more audience-friendly, but escalating tension is missing. The book plays a complicated game of narrative withholding, only disclosing who betrayed who in the very last sentence. Naishtat’s less interested in this form of game-playing, untangling the narrative and lightening the tone considerably, but removing any sense of rising stakes in the process. It’s a shame that the results don’t gel, because Naishtat’s interest in adapting an esoteric formalist background to populist cinema is a rarity in the festival-film world and an instinct that should be encouraged. Despite partially flubbing his fifth feature, he remains a formidable talent to keep an eye on.

Grade: B-

“Glaxo” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2026. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.