‘La Casa’ Review: Diego Peretti Anchors Gustavo Triviño’s Urban Noir About A Fired Accountant Who Will Do Anything To Keep What He Owns

There is a noble and rich tradition of Argentine film noir that recent generations of filmmakers haven’t tapped into the way they should. A number of local movies from the past few decades can fairly be called solid crime stories, but the genre remains underexplored through the urban realism that defined the New Argentine Cinema and its neighbors. Few directors in recent years have tried to pick up the baton from the likes of Adolfo Aristarain or Juan Carlos Desanzo, to name just two of the practitioners of the late-twentieth-century policier. Fabián Bielinsky is perhaps the strongest reference point of this century, a filmmaker who seemed genuinely drawn to working out his ideas through genre. Pablo Trapero, Adrián Caetano, Luis Ortega, Juan José Campanella and Pablo Fendrik, among others, have also ventured into it, but only now and then.

La casa (The House) is the second feature by Gustavo Triviño, and both fall squarely under the urban noir banner. They are somewhat sordid, uncomfortable films that sway between realism and genre, with one foot in something close to slice-of-life comedy and the other planted firmly in the crime story. In each of them (his debut, De martes a martes, dates from 2012), the subject matter is tied to current events but approached from an unusual angle, pushing characters out of recognizable, everyday situations and into the territory of criminal fiction. It’s a slow process, one that gradually turns seemingly ordinary people into figures far darker, even more sinister, than they first appeared.

The protagonist here is Hugo Vaca (Diego Peretti, in his best performance in a long time), an accountant in a senior administrative post at a company about to be bought by Chinese investors. Word reaches him that once the sale goes through, the ten people who work under him will be laid off. Armed with that information, Hugo confronts the company’s president, who confirms it. «It’s only 10 out of more than 500,» he tells him. Hugo isn’t comforted. These are precisely the people in his department, the ones he had promised that nothing would happen to. Right there, he loses control and punches his boss, and the number of people fired ends up being eleven, not ten. In his case, with cause. Ergo: no severance whatsoever.

Jobless and already 57, Hugo has to face a harsh labor market he isn’t well prepared for. He knows how to do his job, but he doesn’t speak english, he’s at a tricky age to be hired for a senior position like the one he lost, and he soon realizes he’s getting nowhere. He doesn’t even do well as an Uber driver. His best friend, Gastón (Fabián Arenillas), offers the most obvious solution: «Sell your house, and with what they give you, you can buy a few apartments, live in one and rent out the rest.» The thing is, Hugo owns a huge place, with a garden and a pool, that has become far too big for him now that his ex-wife and his son have moved to Spain. But he wants nothing to do with selling. The house, he says, is his place in the world. He built it with so much effort, devotion and care that parting with it would be like dying while still alive.

Then a strange possibility comes up, one that is probably not entirely legal. There are people, he’s told, who buy houses in advance. They pay half of the value but let the owner live there until his death. Hugo finds the deal a bit suspicious, but with few options left he decides to try his luck. He gets in touch with the mysterious «Negro» Bernal (César Troncoso), a man who can only be reached through intermediaries and who has a reputation as a heavy, well-connected type, the kind of person you’re better off not knowing much about. And in his need to hold on to his house at all costs, Vaca gets drawn into a business that is shady in more ways than one. As for the rest, it’s best not to know too much before watching the film.

The first half of La casa plays almost like a comedy of manners, with some amusing and curious touches on how Hugo goes through his attempts to find work, or the awkward situations he runs into behind the wheel of his Uber. His contact with Bernal through Doña Celia (the recently deceased Marta Lubos, in her final screen role), a grocery store owner who acts as a go-between, starts tilting the field toward suspense. A series of peculiar incidents involving the milanesa sandwiches the woman makes, and which Hugo dares to turn down, begin to cloud his relationship with Bernal. And by the time the buyers show up, we already sense that the promised real estate deal smells like something far more troublesome.

The second half takes Hugo, step by step, into a world completely foreign to men like him. Triviño’s smart decision is to give a series of meetings and transactions a thick, heavy atmosphere, even when it’s unclear whether that density is real or only in the protagonist’s head. The world of businessmen, artists, bodyguards and improbable deals that Vaca wanders into is strange enough on its own, but it’s he who amplifies those qualities, he who begins to suspect that the deal may, at some point, involve getting rid of him. Hugo smells something rotten in the world he’s entering, but neither he, nor the viewer even more so, can tell where things will go wrong.

Triviño is a highly experienced camera operator (his specialty is the famed Steadicam, and he has worked on around 300 films and TV episodes over twenty years), and he handles with a good eye and a strong narrative pulse Hugo’s slow but steady immersion into what may be a criminal underworld. At the same time, given his own backstory and how we’ve already seen him behave, we know Hugo may be a timid, indecisive man, but he also has his dark and potentially violent side. And when the deals get more complicated than they first appeared (the script sprinkles in classic crime-story devices here and there), all of these elements collide.

The seasoned Troncoso is La casa‘s ace in the hole. When he enters the story, with his sinuous yet unmistakable way of applying pressure and spreading fear, the film begins to turn the dial toward genre. Nothing truly criminal happens for quite a while, but the atmosphere is already in place. The combination of a murky deal and sinister characters (the buyers, led by Mariano Argento, contribute their share as well) bends our expectations, and the viewer already knows that things will only get more complicated and that not everyone will walk away unscathed. Triviño’s achievement is making that transition believable, turning what looked like a dramatic comedy of manners into a dark survival story, a violent tale about what a man is capable of doing to avoid losing his most treasured possession.