Wild Tales

Damián Szifron opens with his shortest story and closes with his longest: the first is over within minutes aboard a plane, the last fills a wedding hall. Shocks are loaded at the front, sustained tension at the back; no character carries between parts, so anyone hunting a link will fail. Szifron wrote twelve to fifteen tales, then kept the harshest. The highway confrontation was shot between Salta and Cafayate, the empty landscape set deliberately against the violence. Gustavo Santaolalla wrote the score, and El Deseo, the Spanish company of the brothers Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar, is among the producers. The Bombita segment, with Ricardo Darín, is built on tow trucks and parking fine bureaucracy; it is the most local of the six and reads differently outside Argentina. It played in competition at Cannes in 2014 and was nominated for foreign language film at the 87th Academy Awards; Ida took it. By the INCAA count it drew 3,986,372 admissions at home, and in 2024 was still called the highest earning Argentine film. A good fit if you will not mind the first story ending before you have settled in, and the film restarting from zero six times in a different tone each time. Not for you if the physical and emotional cruelty of the wedding segment cannot read as comedy.