190 min | NR | October 18, 2023 | Mubi
A bank teller steals the exact sum he needs to never work again, then turns himself in to serve a short sentence while a nervous coworker hides the cash. Rodrigo Moreno stretches that scheme into a wandering anti-capitalist comedy about time, work, and the hours a job quietly steals from you. The robbery is the easy part, and freedom turns out to be the harder crime.
Morán works as a teller at a Buenos Aires bank where the days dissolve into the count of other people’s money. He runs the math on his own life. He needs the exact sum of his remaining salaries to never work again. So he takes it from the vault and hands it to a coworker named Román to hide. Rodrigo Moreno builds the film around a single proposition. A short prison sentence buys a long freedom, and the only real theft is the one the job commits against your time.
Daniel Elías plays Morán with the flat calm of a man who has already decided. He confesses to the crime with the same neutral face he uses to stamp deposit slips. Esteban Bigliardi plays Román as the opposite temperament, a careful man dragged into a scheme he never chose. Bigliardi lets the anxiety leak out in small gestures, the way Román checks doors and recounts the hidden bills. Margarita Molfino plays Norma, the woman both men meet in the hills of Córdoba, and she grounds the film’s second half in something unguarded. Germán de Silva plays Del Toro, the prison fixer who collects his cut, with a menace that never raises its voice.
Moreno writes and directs the film as a set of rhymes. Morán and Román are anagrams of each other, and the film folds one man into the other across every cut. The editing builds these doublings into the structure, splicing Morán’s days inside prison against Román’s days at the office until the two lives blur. The cinematography trades the gray boxes of the bank for the green sierras of Córdoba and lets the camera wander as the men do. The sound design holds onto the small noises of labor, the stamps and the drawers and the fluorescent hum, then drops them for wind and water once the money sets the men loose. Moreno trusts the long take and the digression, and the film breathes at the pace of a man who has stopped watching the clock.
This is a heist film with no interest in the heist. The money is a premise. The real subject is what a person does with the hours a job would otherwise eat. Moreno lets the structure sprawl because the sprawl is the argument, that freedom feels like wandering and not like a plan. The film asks whether either man actually escapes or whether they only trade one cage for another. It declines to answer, and the refusal is the most honest thing about it.