Critics reviews

Like the best film noir, with which this in undoubtedly in dialogue, Trenque Lauquen is a film about affect and textural cohesion moreso than logic and catharsis.

A four-hour film told across 12 chapters and arriving in two parts, this epic mystery is a remarkable achievement... Laura Citarella, its director, cannily wields narrative like a magician might, misdirecting the audience or obfuscating.

Citarella’s storytelling — all flashbacks, repetitions and overlaps — suggest the hypnotically unpredictable drift of a Roberto Bolaño novel... Trenque Lauquen plucks the bizarre out of the everyday, to laid-back but altogether magical effect.

With the verve of a master classical storyteller, Citarella stages the unfolding of this eccentric mystery while processing the dizzying flow of information with a grace and precision that will have you hanging on every frame.

As Citarella’s camera follows Laura into the wilderness on her unexplained walkabout, there is something intriguing about the amplitude of her film-making language, the cool way she refuses to tie anything up. Cult status beckons.

Citarella’s film posits that being lost can be a kind of liberation, and that mystery, in movies, can be an end in itself... The pleasure lies in the telling... rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.

Trenque Lauquen [is] a film whose intricate, shape-shifting storytelling ultimately resists the fulsome pleasures of story, a work whose narrative indirection serves, in the end, no other purpose but negation.

[Trenque Lauquen] reaffirms what we are too perilously close to forgetting: that going to a cinema, especially to succumb to a movie that makes a not-insignificant demand on your time, is itself a commitment to adventure—a folly, perhaps, but what memorable romance isn’t?

[Trenque Lauquen] will best appeal to those who like their mystery to come wrapped in an enigma or enjoy their shaggy dog stories to shake many tales.

Long movies are not necessarily good or even ambitious; Trenque Lauquen is both. Notwithstanding a few minutes that could be shed here and there, everything from its sweet, intriguing Part I, the strategically placed and electrifying title sequence, and deliciously ominous Part II feel purposeful, organic.

Many artists have taken similarly postmodern notions of an impossible truth into realms of despair and madness, but Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes, of losing oneself as the catalyst for realizing no one has a set, permanent self to lose in the first place.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.