by Hudson Moura
Written and directed by Benjamín Naishtat, Glaxo moves between 1957 and 1984, connecting the intimate history of four young men with Argentina’s troubled political past. The story begins in Chivilcoy in 1957, where the arrival of Don Braulio Folcada, an ominous former police commissioner, and his seductive wife Miranda, played by Lali Espósito, fractures the bond between four inseparable friends. Decades later, the consequences of those relationships return through guilt, resentment, unresolved wounds, and the possibility of revenge.
The film is adapted from the 2009 novel by Argentine writer Hernán Ronsino. Speaking about the adaptation, Naishtat has described being attracted to the novel’s multilayered narrative, its “noir allure,” and the way Argentina’s historical traumas emerge through intimate passions and revenge. He deliberately chose not to reproduce the novel’s structure faithfully, preferring to preserve what he calls the atmosphere of a “small town hell.” These intentions help explain the film’s fragmentation, but they do not necessarily make that fragmentation dramatically successful.
At the centre of the earlier period is Miguelito Barrios, played by newcomer Joaquín Bonadeo, perhaps the most intriguing character in the film. His desires, loyalties, jealousy, and eventual betrayal become entangled with Folcada’s authority and with the relationships among the four young men. Yet Glaxo often withholds so much information that ambiguity gradually becomes confusion. It is not always clear whether characters act primarily out of jealousy, fear, attraction, self-preservation, resentment, or some combination of these impulses.
The problem becomes more pronounced because the personal story is supposed to intersect with a much larger political history. Folcada clearly embodies institutional authority associated with a violent moment in Argentina’s past, and one particularly disturbing episode of political repression involving him should become a crucial connection between the private drama and the country’s historical violence. Instead, the episode feels strangely detached from the rest of the narrative. Its political importance is evident, but the film does not provide enough context or dramatic integration for that importance to resonate fully within the coming-of-age story.
This is where Glaxo becomes frustrating. Friendship, sexuality, jealousy, betrayal, political violence, and revenge are all present, but the film never completely establishes how these elements should relate to one another. Rather than allowing the different historical and emotional layers to deepen one another, the fragmentation often forces the viewer to reconstruct connections that have not been sufficiently developed.
Even the film’s genre identity becomes difficult to determine. Naishtat himself speaks of the novel’s noir qualities, and the press material describes the film as a kind of parallel revenge thriller. But those characteristics do not emerge clearly enough on screen to define the experience of watching Glaxo. There are certainly elements associated with noir—moral ambiguity, compromised characters, desire, violence, manipulation—but they remain scattered rather than forming a coherent generic language. The same is true of the thriller dimension: the film repeatedly creates the expectation of suspense without consistently generating the dramatic momentum that suspense requires.
Formally, this fragmentation is deliberate. Naishtat and cinematographer Pedro Sotero used different cameras and optics to create three parallel visual languages and formats, while editor Lívia Serpa worked to organize the multiple strands of the story. It is an ambitious strategy, but the visual distinctions do not always translate into equally clear narrative distinctions. The architecture of the film frequently feels more calculated than emotionally engaging.
Naishtat’s direction is extremely controlled, sometimes to the point of becoming academic, heavy, and overly self-conscious. The pacing is slow, and suspense is emphasized through framing, rhythm, music, and sound effects. But the insistence on creating tension can become counterproductive. At certain moments, the suspense is pushed so emphatically that it becomes almost unintentionally comic, making scenes feel more mannered than threatening.
This is particularly noticeable in the soundtrack. The score is by acclaimed Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi, whom Naishtat invited because of his admiration for Umebayashi’s work on In the Mood for Love. The director explains that the score helped establish the film’s tone already during the editing process. Yet despite Umebayashi’s considerable reputation, the music is, for me, one of Glaxo’s weakest elements. Its instrumental cues frequently feel conspicuously old-fashioned and overly insistent, announcing suspense rather than allowing tension to emerge naturally from the characters and situations. Instead of supporting the mystery, the music sometimes accentuates the heaviness of the direction.
The cast is more convincing. Lali Espósito brings considerable presence to Miranda, while Marcelo Subiotto gives Folcada an unsettling combination of authority and opacity. The ensemble also includes established Argentine actors Esteban Bigliardi, Esteban Lamothe, and Alan Sabbagh, alongside younger performers such as Joaquín Bonadeo, Josela Barbeito, and Martín Armendariz, whom Naishtat identifies as important discoveries of the production. Bonadeo in particular gives Miguelito a certain unreadability that suits a character caught between friendship, desire, fear, and betrayal.
There is also an interesting contemporary dimension to the film’s production. Although Glaxo is deeply rooted in Argentine history, it is an Argentina-Brazil co-production and was filmed in southern Brazil. Naishtat explains that producer Rodrigo Teixeira proposed shooting there because making the film in present-day Argentina had become increasingly difficult. This circumstance gives the film an additional, if indirect, connection between Argentina’s historical conflicts and the contemporary difficulties of producing cinema in the country.
Ultimately, Glaxo attempts to connect youth, friendship, desire, betrayal, revenge, and political violence across different periods of Argentine history. The problem is that these elements never completely cohere. The fragmentation that structures the film makes it difficult not only to follow certain motivations but also to understand exactly what kind of dramatic relationship the film wants to establish between its intimate story and its political background.
There is clearly a compelling film somewhere inside this material. The idea that unresolved national trauma survives within friendships, desires, jealousies, and acts of revenge is potentially powerful. But Glaxo remains too distant from its own characters and too dependent on an elaborate structure that does not generate enough clarity or emotional force. Its heavy direction, overstated suspense, problematic score, and insufficient links between periods and characters ultimately weaken its political dimension. What should feel like history invading and contaminating private life instead too often feels like several potentially fascinating stories struggling to become one.
Rating: 3/5