El Profugo (dir. Natalia Meta), 2021

“I don’t think he’s right for you,” the flight attendant informs Ines while hovering over her new boyfriend, Leopoldo. “How about I kill him now?” After a short tussle, Ines is flung toward a neighboring passenger and awakens from her nightmare. Or was it a nightmare? The line between the real and the imaginary is blurred in El Profugo.

Ines is a voice actress by day and soprano singer by night. She spends the opening moments of the film dubbing a Japanese horror film, cupping her hands to echo moans before letting out a blood curdling scream. The opening of El Profugo, twenty-one minutes in length, ends with a similar scream as Ines finds Leopoldo has fallen off their resort balcony during an argument over his possessiveness. The aforementioned nightmare appears to have been foreshadowing, or perhaps attempting to protect (or preserve) Ines' independence from a needy, overbearing man. Following the death of Leopoldo, Ines begins to suffer the colliding of the imaginary and the real world. Her vocals are inconsistent, resulting in a transfer to the mezzo section of her chorus, and interference is heard during her dubbing work. Her downstairs neighbor claims to hear heels clacking back and forth for hours during the early morning. Ines has seen specialists, none of whom suggest anything is wrong. She has gathered a collection of pills, gifted to her from her choral director and others attempting to remedy her vocal issues. Marta, Ines’ mother, arrives surprisingly in the middle of the night. “You didn’t get my message?” she asks.

El Profugo is largely scored by drastic organ notes, fitting as much of Ines’ choral practice is put on hold while Alberto tunes the company organ. Ines first meets Alberto off-screen, his voice guiding her as the organ tunes key by key, before she meets him face to face between a wood-slatted wall. When Ines finds her day job dubbing Japanese films further compromised by audio interference, she is confronted by an older actress, Adela, who claims Ines has an intruder. Adela suggests these intruders may enter the human world through nightmares. Ines must navigate her hovering mother, a new romance with Alberto, ghostly visions of Leopoldo, her compromised voice, all while attempting to expel intruders from her nightmares before they infiltrate her reality. Or, have they already?

El Profugo may aggravate certain audiences with a purposefully manic editing style and disjointed script designed to uphold a much needed hazy narrative. However, with close attention to detail the audience will touch upon what is a nightmare and what is real (to an extent). These technical elements are curated and polished to give away enough of what the audience needs, while still enshrouding the haunting mystery of the premise. Anchored by two queens of Argentine cinema, Erica Rivas and Cecilia Roth, and with a little help from the cute and charismatic Nahuel Perez Biscayart, El Profugo is able to sell what otherwise could be a convoluted and dense premise (at least with a 90-minute runtime constraint). Rather, writer-director Natalia Meta has assembled a worthy cast and technical team to fully realize her ambitious script adaptation of El Mal Menor by C.E. Feiling. Most pleasing is the Almodovar-esque attention to visual details such as color hues and camera framing, particularly notable during the dubbing scenes and the iconic climax where Ines, much like her own nightmares, intrudes upon the fourth wall from film screen to our reality....

Rating: 9/10