Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971. Carlos Robledo Puch is a 19-year-old boy with an angelic face, but a vocational thief as well, who acts ruthlessly, without remorse. When he meets Ramón, they follow together a dark path of crime and death.
El Ángel is a visually lush Argentine crime film directed by Luis Ortega, anchored by Lorenzo Ferro's magnetic and genuinely unsettling performance as the real-life serial killer Carlos Robledo Puch. The cinematography by Julián Apezteguia is a clear standout — bathed in warm 1970s aesthetics, it's sumptuous and evocative without feeling like mere nostalgia pastiche. The acting, particularly Ferro, is exceptional: he plays the amoral angel with a disarming lightness that makes the violence all the more chilling. The plot follows a fairly familiar crime-spree arc and doesn't fully excavate the psychological depths its premise promises, keeping it solidly above average but not groundbreaking. The ending, while thematically coherent, arrives somewhat abruptly and feels slightly undercooked given the film's buildup. Novelty is decent — it has a distinctive tonal blend of breezy pop energy and dark brutality — but the 'charming sociopath on a crime spree' subgenre is well-trodden enough to keep it from scoring higher.