This novelistic Argentine mystery invites us down a rabbit hole into a cinematic warren of interwoven stories. A critical and cult favourite regarded as the best film of 2023 by cinephile tastemakers Cahiers du Cinema.
A wondrous multipart epic… Once you lose yourself in the thickets of Trenque Lauquen, you won’t want to be found.
Trenque Lauquen 2022
From El Pampero Cine, the collective behind the mind-bending La Flor comes a labyrinthine tale which unspools over an intoxicating four hours.
“The film opens on the news that a character named Laura (Laura Paredes, who also co-wrote the film with Citarella) is missing, and that’s just the first of many subtle overlaps with David Lynch’s bucolic meta soap opera, Twin Peaks. Through a series of recollections from Laura’s spurned lover, we track her efforts to untangle a tortured fling that occurred in the past, all of which is detailed via a cache of love letters that have been artfully concealed between the pages of books from the local library.
With the verve of a master classical storyteller, Citarella stages the unfolding of this eccentric mystery while processing the dizzying flow of information with a grace and precision that will have you hanging on every frame. It’s compulsive and completely absorbing, and Laura’s dedication to this ad hoc investigation which may have no conclusion is echoed in a performance that empathetically redefines tired cinematic notions of obsessive behaviour.” — David Jenkins, Little White Lies