Guilt and the return of the repressed are behind this elegant, disquieting and impressively acted political ghost story from Argentinian film-maker Francisco Márquez. Cecilia (Elisa Carricajo) is a sociology professor and single mother of a little boy, Juan (Ciro Coien Pardo); she is very successful, though on edge about her recent application for an academic promotion. Cecilia gets on well with her maid Nebe (Mecha Martinez) but is made very uncomfortable when Nebe brings round her teenage son Kevin (Eliot Otazo). Kevin seems dour, unsmiling, perhaps with learning difficulties.
In the middle of a stormy night, Cecilia is awoken by a terrifying banging at the door, preceded by an eerie dreamlike voice murmuring “Cecilia” in her ear. Peering through the shutters, she can see it is Kevin and is too scared to open up. The next morning, she sees on the news that Kevin’s body has been found in the river, with protesters alleging he was chased down and killed by the police – one of the state’s “common crimes” directed at the poor. Cecilia can’t bring herself to confess to Nebe that she could have helped her son, or tell any of her colleagues. And so she begins to crack under the terrible strain of maintaining this secret along with the day-to-day tasks of her sophisticated and successful intellectual life, believing Kevin has come back to haunt her.
As well as a comment on Argentina’s present, A Common Crime is about its past: Kevin has been “disappeared”, like dissidents under the junta. And when Cecilia is late for work one day it makes her head of department very nervous – he is old enough to remember that when certain academics were “late”, they never showed up at all.
There are points of comparison here with other films – the Dardennes’ The Unknown Girl, for example, or Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman – and the junta killings arguably play the same role here as France’s “nuit noire”, the notorious 1961 police slaughter of Algerian protesters, in Michael Haneke’s Hidden. But Márquez brings his own distinctive touch and Carricajo is excellent; she shows us how, with so much at stake and with a lifetime’s adult experience at putting on a good show and presenting as perfectly fine, a prosperous middle-class professional can swallow a guilty secret and carry on. But the tiny poison symptoms inevitably begin to surface. A smart piece of work.
• A Common Crime is released on 9 April on digital platforms.
