‘The Aura’ at 20: Fabián Bielinsky’s Final Masterpiece

Epileptic. Extremely quiet. Resentful of the life he ended up with. Convinced he’s smarter than everyone else. Bad marriage. Selfish. A physical coward? Withdrawn. Intense. Sad.” With these words Fabián Bielinsky sketched out the protagonist of El aura, notes later collected in El fulgor, a book published in 2016 by BAFICI. It is a blunt portrait, not only of the film’s taciturn taxidermist but—at moments—perhaps of the director himself. Bielinsky’s second and, tragically, final film takes the idea of the alter ego and pushes it further than most: direct, unflinching, cinematically aggressive. The entire story unfolds from the protagonist’s point of view. He has no name in the credits, though critics and viewers often call him “Espinosa.” Often shown from behind or in silence, he seems less like a conventional character than like a vessel into which the spectator—or Bielinsky himself—might slip, crossing the invisible threshold between audience and screen to see things from within the film. Like us, the protagonist spends much of the film not really understanding what is happening. He guesses. He speculates. He assumes. Sometimes he’s right, sometimes not. He believes, as seasoned viewers of crime films tend to believe, that he knows where the story is going—but maybe not. Reality has a way of disobeying the neat constructions of the mind. Life cannot be planned down to the last detail.

At its core, El aura is about the gap between what we think we know (a lot) and what we actually know (very little), between the world of ideas and the world of facts, between intentions and achievements, between imagination and reality. It is also a film about masculinity and the many shades that word contains. The protagonist lives in a universe of silence, numbers, obsessions, and control. As a taxidermist, he spends his days sealed off in his workshop, designing the world to his liking—stuffing animals, choosing the color of their eyes, adjusting their skins and shapes to his taste. Inside that workshop, he plays God. When he enters a bank and imagines a robbery, in his head every detail fits. The pieces fall neatly into place. In those moments, he is a screenwriter, orchestrating a flawless scheme. But when reality forces him to act, he becomes a director. And in the real world, things no longer unfold as scripted. Plans change constantly. Other people intervene with their own ideas, their own agendas. Reality refuses to be controlled.

Seen from that angle, Bielinsky’s second film could be understood as the tale of a screenwriter who had to step out and direct, only to discover that the world is never as malleable as imagined. In the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, we like to think events follow our design, but that is nothing more than the illusion of control. Real life is not a stuffed animal, posed and frozen forever. It moves, slips through our fingers, drifts under the pull of other forces that resist or compete with us. In its play of doubles, in its blend of dream and reality where we are never sure whether events are actually happening, Bielinsky stages that collision. El aura is a film about the distance between the person we think we are and the one we really are. And about what we do once we realize the difference.

Ricardo Darín, as Bielinsky’s early notes indicate, speaks very little in the film. There are two long sequences—one ten minutes, the other nearly twenty—where almost no words are spoken, save for his shouts at a wolf-dog whose presence fills the screen. Darín’s character arrives in an undefined region of Patagonia with a friend (Alejandro Awada, pointedly named Sontag) to hunt deer. For him, it’s a difficult test, because reality suddenly intrudes. The animals here are alive, not stuffed. They move. They don’t arrive at his workshop already dead: someone must pull the trigger. And Darín, like the fragile protagonists of Deliverance—a Bielinsky favorite—is a city man, devoid of “wildness” in his veins. Faced with a living creature just meters away, his hand shakes, he faints.

The film is structured as a test of masculinity, a theme that runs throughout in subtle, intelligent ways. His wife has left him, apparently because he was chained to his workshop, preferring to turn up the stereo rather than listen to her. He probably blames himself. But the script also reveals that Sontag, fearless in the forest and quick to mock him as a coward, was violent with his own wife. He is not the only one. The subtext is clear: the supposed alpha males are not necessarily models of strength but often men whose dominance masks brutality. In his mind, the trip south could become a revenge of sorts—the revenge of the weakling, proof that this timid, “defective” man can outdo those who flaunt their masculinity. And maybe that’s what happens. Or maybe it only happens in his imagination.

This constant oscillation between reality and fantasy is woven into the film’s fabric. It begins on a “Wednesday” in the workshop and ends on a “Wednesday” in the same workshop—perhaps the following week, perhaps the very same day. Bielinsky slips past transitions with sly edits: without Darín moving a muscle, he’s suddenly gone from airport to airplane to a car driving into the Patagonian forest. Above all, there are his epileptic seizures—blackouts of uncertain length that always strike when he is alone. Many people with epilepsy experience an “aura,” a fleeting warning before the convulsion, seconds in which reality itself warps and breaks apart. Perhaps the entire 128 minutes of El aura take place in one of those moments, as a dream or nightmare that stretches far beyond its actual duration.

In Patagonia, the taxidermist—maybe Espinosa—accidentally kills a man while aiming at a deer. Suddenly, he finds himself in possession of another identity: Dietrich. He hides the body and begins piecing together who Dietrich was and what he was plotting. The discovery is staggering: Dietrich was preparing to rob an armored truck carrying the casino’s weekend take before it closes forever. The expected haul: 2.5 million pesos—at the time, close to a million U.S. dollars. Rifling through papers in the cabin, the taxidermist realizes he has stumbled onto a heist grander than anything he had conjured in his head back in Buenos Aires. And so, he decides to step into Dietrich’s shoes. The problem, of course, is that he is not Dietrich. He doesn’t know the details. Like the protagonist of The Usual Suspects, he must assemble the story from scraps, assuming how the pieces fit together. He believes his exceptional memory gives him an edge—as we saw in the opening bank sequence—but will that be enough?

Other characters soon complicate things. Diana (Dolores Fonzi), who runs the cabins where he is staying, waits for her husband, who never comes back. We realize he is Dietrich. Her brother Julio (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) clearly suspects something is amiss. The dog, more than anyone, knows the truth—it smells him, understands. Then Dietrich’s partners arrive: Sosa (Pablo Cedrón) and Montero (Walter Reyno), ready to move forward with the heist. Since they never knew Dietrich personally, the taxidermist passes himself off as him for a while. His disguise doesn’t convince for long, but what persuades them is his knowledge of the mechanics of the plan—gleaned from Dietrich’s cabin and reconstructed in his head. This timid “nobody” may not be Dietrich, but he knows how the job is supposed to go. And while Sosa doubts him, Montero insists on continuing. Everyone here owes something; everyone needs this job to happen.

But unlike many stories of men of ideas forced into action—screenwriters turned directors—the plot of El aura doesn’t unleash a hidden hero within. The first major test comes when he seeks out a man named Vega in a factory, only to arrive in the middle of a brutal robbery. He does not act. No one even notices him. He simply observes the violence like an audience member at the movies, following events until he retrieves the key he needs. It is one of the film’s most brilliant sequences, a demonstration of cinematic restraint. Like Bielinsky himself, and like the taxidermist as a kind of closet screenwriter, he remains at a distance, watching, letting things fall into place.

The second action sequence is different: no longer imagined by a writer, but executed by a director. Here, he misreads Dietrich’s plan, and reality slips beyond his grasp. Another seizure prevents him from making a crucial phone call. By the time he arrives, it is too late. There are gunshots, bodies, blood. The neat world of ideas collapses. Now it is the real world: running, shooting, bleeding, chaos. A realm for which he is not prepared. Can wit and imagination save him? Or is the fantasy of control finally exposed as just that?

El aura is remarkable from every angle. The stripped-down dialogue, the performances free of any artifice, the somber tone, the way physical space bends into nightmare and hallucination, the script’s doubling of figures and opening of doors—all evoke the precision of theory while never tipping into dryness. Its references range from classic film noir to the 1970s American crime film and even the existentialist edge of the French policier. The result is the sensation of a complete work, a summation of obsessions, fears, and formal gambits.

Beyond its elaborate script and its “convenient” coincidences—allowed by form and by the hazy border between reality and fantasy—El aura is above all a triumph of mise-en-scène, a masterclass by a filmmaker in near-total control of his medium, only two features into his career. The factory robbery observed from a distance recalls The Conversation, another ’70s American classic in which the gap between reality and perception is everything. The way the protagonist “visualizes” suspense and action scenes in his head before they happen shows a sober mastery of cinematic space. And his gradual realization that he never fully understood the heist plan gives the film its thesis-like structure. Perhaps the entire story was nothing more than a movie playing in his mind as he fainted at the ATM in the opening scene. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the final look from the dog into the camera is proof that something, in fact, has changed.

In an interview, Bielinsky himself explained that El aura was “about the leap from not doing to doing, from desiring to achieving, from being an honest man to becoming a criminal. What happens to this character is that he has a fantasy of control—he believes the mind rules the world, that intelligence determines the sequence of events.” Over the course of the film, the protagonist learns that “his mind does not rule experience» and that the fantasy of control is precisely that: a fantasy. Reality would soon prove it, brutally, with Bielinsky’s own sudden death, depriving us of more films from him. Like the taxidermist, we are left only to dream them, with all their details, twists, subtleties, and shadows. And they will be perfect, because they will exist only in our imagination.