Critics reviews

To Kill a Man (2014) is both entertaining and morally and psychologically complex... Hitchcock has said that in making Torn Curtain‘s big fight scene in the farmhouse, he wanted to show just how physically difficult it is to kill someone–as opposed to the seemingly effortless killings that fill American genre films. Almendras' film is almost entirely about how difficult it is in all ways.

...I was very impressed by the Chilean Matar a un Hombre (To Kill a Man, Alejandro Fernández Almendras). I was not alone; the beautifully shot To Kill a Man was both a Special Jury Prize & FICC Jury award winner for its relatable, restrained new take on the revenge thriller, which takes adroit snipes at constructions of masculinity, class and legal propriety in contemporary Chilean society, anchored by an excellent lead performance from Daniel Candia.

Almendras's film doesn't refrain from such depictions of violence—in fact, it's an almost procedural documentation of the steps one man will take to exact revenge on a neighbor who continues to torment his family—but there's a far greater sense of conscience and consequence in its steely-eyed presentation. It may take Almendras until the final scene to reveal his greater objective, but it's a moment which casts the preceding eighty minutes in a useful new light.

The overall restraint is highly effective in escalating the dread, even turning Jorge's workaday troubles, like a chainsaw that won't start, into moments of chilling uncertainty... And yet, To Kill a Man is also too restrained for its own good. As quietly, meticulously handsome as the film is... there's precious little juicy subtext to its design, and in the end, it's not much more than a tragic vigilante tale for the art house.

[The film] bristles with humor, but it is resolutely cosmic — in other words, Almendras uses comedy as a kind of defense mechanism against the injustice of the world. For him, you sense, life is often arduous, painful, and sad. And in the end the only appropriate response is to laugh... The film is too smart to rely on an easy gimmick like tension... By the end we are moved not by the moral transgression our hero has been forced to undertake, but by how much he has endured before undertaking it.

[Jorge's] unspectacular but artfully plotted act of vengeance is dramatized over two remarkable, inventively tense sequences, one of them a lengthy, stomach-knotting scene that recalls the finale of Larrain's "Post Mortem"... Indeed, it's the blank spaces that provide much of the power to "To Kill a Man," be it an unseen but audible act of violence, the unexplained but poignantly understandable collapse of a marriage, or the protag's unreadable response to his own acts of brutality.