Critics reviews

The film does not serve up its ideas in easily digestible bites. The audience needs to work with a dislocated string of scenes that sometimes highlight absurdity, sometimes violence and frequently say very little at all.

There is a sense of menace underpinning Argentine director Benjamín Naishtat’s brilliant third feature.

What must it have been like to live with Argentina’s desaparecidos phenomenon?... This subtly disturbing, queasily tense satirical nightmare from 33-year-old Argentinian film-maker Benjamín Naishtat answers that question with a story of group neurosis and complicit wretchedness.

With each subplot reinforcing the simmering sense of unease, this compelling recreation of a pernicious period soberingly exposes the ease with which morality can become a casualty of human nature.

Rojo is a tense portrait of an era seen through one ordinary citizen. Its ambiguity touches on the frustrating, but the atmosphere offers a haunting insight into a complex national struggle.

Naishtat’s more subtle critique of bourgeois indifference doesn’t carry the same formal gut punch when compared to the grotesque subversive revelries of Chilean compatriot Pablo Larraín. Rojo is more concerned with how everyday middle class people delude themselves into thinking they won’t be touched by the hand of dictatorship due to their class status.

Neither a political thriller nor entirely a noir, Rojo has its own wicked fuel to burn.

“Rojo” is a sophisticatedly entertaining reminder of our propensity for malevolent apathy.

Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo is a mystery thriller of sorts. That is, it comes across like a thriller, but remains fundamentally mysterious throughout, weaving a texture of loose ends and tantalizing enigmas.

It’s a brutal trip, though Naishtat smartly balances the heaviness with moments of levity and absurd comedy.

Rojo is less a thriller than a brutally chilly satire, concerning men who have the privilege, like other people who haven’t been deemed expendable by their government, to playact, offering ceremonial outrage that gratifies their egos while allowing a diseased society that benefits them to carry on with business as usual.

The main centerpiece is a stylish eclipse sequence, in which everything is tinted red as if everyone were stained with blood.