El Angel (2018)
El Ángel
Film details
Drama · Crime · Luis Ortega · 1h 54min
Synopsis
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.
Verdict
Glamorizes a teenage serial killer and normalizes youth homosexuality with a seductive aesthetic.
In-depth analysis
El Angel constructs a portrait of the serial killer Carlos Robledo Puch that combines two critical underlying concerns. Firstly, it presents the adolescent protagonist's homosexual attraction as a natural part of his process of personal discovery, without critical distance or questioning. The love narrative between Carlitos and Ramón intertwines with the escalation of crime as if they were two sides of the same coin of 'authencity'. Secondly, the film adopts an aesthetic gaze that transforms eleven murders and over forty robberies into material for a seductive visual fable. The protagonist's baby face, blond curls, and angelic appearance do not function as dramatic irony but rather as a strategy of fascination: the viewer is invited to fall in love with the monster. The script deliberately avoids moral condemnation and opts for ambiguity as a form of glamorization. There is no arc of redemption, nor dramatic consequences that expose the horror of his acts. For parents: extreme criminal violence normalized, adolescent homosexual orientation presented naturally, and a staging that seduces instead of warns. Not recommended.