Argentina 1985 (2022)

Argentina, 1985 arrives with the sober bearing of a courtroom sketch rendered in oil. Santiago Mitre's film concerns the prosecution of Argentina's military junta, a legal endeavor undertaken by Julio César Strassera and a ragtag band of junior lawyers who agree to sign their names to a case that could get them killed. The camera sits still. The witnesses speak. The evidence accumulates. There is no montage set to a pop song, no narrator informing us how to feel. The film trusts the material, which is the rarest instinct in contemporary cinema and the reason it never needs to raise its voice.

For the purposes of our classification, the picture is remarkably clean. Women populate the prosecution team and the witness stand, but they are there because they were there in 1985, not because a spreadsheet demanded them. No romantic subplot arrives to validate anyone's identity. The antagonists are generals who threw people from airplanes, not hedge fund managers, so there is nothing to say about the crimes of capital. The Argentine society on display is largely of European descent, and the film has no interest in inventing a racial discourse it cannot support. The environment, body image, neurodiversity: absent, and honestly, the courtroom has enough on its docket.

The closing argument, the famous 'Nunca más,' is delivered within the drama itself and earned by two hours of testimony. It carries moral weight because it is not aimed at the audience like a finger. It is aimed at judges. A lesser production would have turned the victims into props for a lecture. This one lets them testify. The result is a film of conscience that resists the contemporary compulsion to sermonize, and for that restraint alone it deserves our quiet respect.