Savage love

If 2013 was the year of the American Dream film (The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle, Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, The Bling Ring, Nebraska), then 2014 was most definitely the year of the revenge movie. The quest for righteous vengeance in a world devoid of moral centers spurred the plots of studio blockbusters (The Equalizer), midlevel genre pictures (John Wick), foreign films (the excellent Georgian movie The Notebook), and indie releases of the major (Calvary), minor (Blue Ruin) and virtually invisible (Heli) variety. Even the two most popular films at the domestic box office in 2014—American Sniper and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1—were about characters struggling with and paralyzed by their urges to dole out some payback.

All of those films were just appetizers to the main course of Wild Tales. Argentinian writer-director Dami&#;aacute;n Szifron’s black comedy anthology, which played festivals throughout 2014 and was nominated for a Best Foreign Film award at the 2015 Oscars, is the godfather of contemporary revenge films, the granddaddy, the boss, the Great Pumpkin. Wild Tales is the revenge film to end all revenge films, a glorious and bonkers blast of visual creativity and storytelling energy, and one of the most purely entertaining films of the year. If the naughty-boy, early-1990s ouevres of Pedro Almodovar (who also produced) and Quentin Tarantino were somehow able to copulate, then Wild Tales would be their grossly beautiful sextuplet offspring.

Wild Tales shuffles juvenile amorality and hand-of-God sermonizing into the same deck, but it’s perfectly pitched, as though the funniest kid in your high school became Scheherazade for two hours, regaling you with darkly humorous stories of corruption and retribution. Like a vicious predator, Wild Tales sinks its claws into your neck before you even see it coming—the opening story, a hilariously evil chamber piece set aboard an in-flight airplane, is one of the great precredits “grabbers” in recent cinema. Szifron lures us into a defenseless posture by focusing on banalities—a rolling suitcase, a question about mileage points, the muffled roar of the engine, an older professor making time with the runway model sitting across the aisle—until a casual conversation reveals that the disparate passengers are linked together by a malevolent figure from their pasts.

It’s a sublime sequence, like Lost without all the ghosts and angels nonsense, and it culminates in an uproarious freeze frame that assures the viewers that they’re in perfectly fucked-up hands. If this opening sequence doesn’t have you perking up in your seat in anticipation of a great time, then you’re not on this film’s wavelength and you never will be, and the remaining five stories will have little to offer. The miracle of this scene, and of Wild Tales as a whole, is that despite the reprehensible and inhuman behavior on display, it is always more funny and self-assured than stomach-turning and vile.

Nothing else quite matches the impact and concision of that first sequence, but the stories progressively expand the film’s notions of justice while redefining its position on the righteousness of revenge. Szifron keeps finding new variations on the same theme, and although the film lacks the moral fiber and narrative overlap to form a grand “idea,” most of the stories are rooted in the concept of Argentina as a hotbed of corruption and class war that singes everyone it touches.

The final story of the six, a delirious tale of a joyous wedding reception that becomes hell on Earth, seems to offer a ladder into a world of reconciliation and acceptance, but not before a little more blood gets shed.

I know very little about the 39-year-old Szifron or his future prospects—this is his third feature, although only his first since 2005, and he has spent most of his career working in Argentine television—but I believe that Wild Tales heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.