In a darkened movie theater, sometime around 1984, two middle-aged men watch The Terminator. One tries to explain to the other the logic of time travel, that obsession with returning to the past in order to alter the course of the present. The sequence functions as a subtle nod to the device Benjamín Naishtat deploys in Glaxo: the possibility of returning to 1950s Argentina to exhume the root of a guilt. Yet in that gesture one can also discern where its director stands today, increasingly settled into a terrain of comfortable compromise between auteur ambitions and the conventions of industrial filmmaking.
In adapting Hernán Ronsino’s novel, Naishtat demonstrates undeniable narrative craft in dismantling a complex literary structure, originally fragmented across voices and periods, and transforming it into an accessible, smoothly paced story. The plot takes us to the town of Chivilcoy during the summer of 1957, where the youth of four friends is disrupted by the arrival of Ramón Folcada, a fearsome police officer involved in political repression who has become a local authority, and by the magnetic presence of his wife. Through this web of shared desires, tested loyalties, and favors unfolding in the shadow of the factory that gives the work its title, the film attempts to articulate a fable about intimate betrayal in a country marked by violence.
There are aspects in which the film works effectively. The cast consistently sustains the dramatic pulse: Marcelo Subiotto brings just the right mixture of danger and coldness without ever needing to raise his voice, while Esteban Bigliardi conveys, in adulthood, the weight of remorse carried for decades. Likewise, the period reconstruction is technically polished in both its design and its use of cinematography, which adjusts its palette to distinguish the luminosity of lost youth from the somber austerity of the 1980s. At its best, when Naishtat lingers on glances or on the uncomfortable silences between the young men, the film succeeds in capturing that uncanny atmosphere of initiation.
Yet the central problem with Glaxo is the way this turn toward commercial filmmaking dilutes the harshness that once defined his filmography. As was the case with Puan, many of its sequences seem calculated and measured with surgical precision, seemingly conceived more around its sales strategy, its high-impact trailer, and other situations dictated by platforms than around the organic development of a distinctive vision. The uncomfortable edges of the original text are smoothed over by an excessively polished production package in which aesthetics become a predictable formula. The integration of adolescent melodrama and politics also never quite comes together: the commissioner’s historical background often functions more as a conceptual prestige marker placed behind the scene than as a threat that permeates everyday life.
Glaxo occupies a territory of calculated neutrality. It is a technically accomplished work that confirms Naishtat’s ability to helm larger-budget productions, but at the cost of relinquishing the risk that once defined his gaze. Far removed from the power and unsettling force of History of Fear, the film offers a measured journey through memory and pain, presenting a filmmaker fully aware of how to smooth the difficult edges of a story so that it can fit, without friction, into the molds of today’s market.
