El Angel (2018)
Directed by Luis Ortega
Yes — El Angel is woke, scoring 60 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Luis Ortega's El Angel presents a killer with an angelic face and a body count, and it presents both without apology.
Consciousness Markers
The protagonist's gay/bisexual identity and his relationship with Ramón are central to the plot, with the film explicitly reimagining the real Carlos Robledo Puch as a gay psychopathic killer. LGBTQ themes are a major focus.
The film takes significant liberties with the true story of Carlos Robledo Puch, notably reimagining him as gay without historical evidence, which constitutes a revisionist portrayal of a real figure.
The film features an entirely Argentine/Latin American cast, which is natural for its setting rather than a deliberate diversity casting push. It does not exhibit the modern Hollywood practice of race- or identity-conscious casting.
The film is a stylish crime drama that does not preach or lecture the audience on social issues.
No feminist agenda or commentary is present; female characters are largely passive or manipulative in service of the male protagonists' story.
The film does not engage with racial consciousness or racial justice themes.
There is no climate crusade or environmental messaging in the film.
The crimes are motivated by personal thrill and psychopathy, not by anti-capitalist ideology or class warfare.
The film does not address body positivity or body image issues.
While the protagonist is a psychopath, the film does not frame this as neurodivergence or advocate for neurodiverse representation.
Why it received this score
Luis Ortega's El Angel presents a killer with an angelic face and a body count, and it presents both without apology. The setting is Buenos Aires, 1971, and the cast is uniformly Argentine, a choice that follows from the material and asks for no credit. Lorenzo Ferro plays Carlos Robledo Puch as a blank and beautiful instrument, and the camera regards him the way a portraitist regards a difficult sitter. He steals, he gives the money away, he kills when the mood requires. The film is stylish to a fault.
The bond between Carlos and Ramón supplies the film's pulse. Ortega takes a real serial killer and makes him gay, a liberty with no basis in the historical record, and he builds the emotional architecture on that invention. The result is a crime drama that reads its protagonist through desire and obsession instead of mere pathology. Whether this flatters the living or the dead is a question the film declines to entertain. It simply proceeds.
El Angel does not lecture. The robberies and murders spring from thrill and emptiness, never from an argument about class or capital. The women drift at the edges, useful or manipulative, and the film has no interest in correcting that. No sermon is delivered, no lesson pressed upon the audience, no character turns to the camera to explain the world. It is a shallow film, and it knows it, and it has the good manners not to pretend otherwise. We are left with a pretty monster dancing alone in an empty house.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971. Carlos Robledo Puch is a 19-year-old boy with an angelic face, but a vocational thief as well, who acts ruthlessly, without remorse. When he meets Ramón, they follow together a dark path of crime and death.
Questions about El Angel
Is El Angel woke?
Yes — El Angel is woke, scoring 60 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Woke.
What makes El Angel woke?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by LGBTQ+ Themes (85) and Revisionist History (45). On LGBTQ+ Themes: The protagonist's gay/bisexual identity and his relationship with Ramón are central to the plot, with the film explicitly reimagining the real Carlos Robledo Puch as a gay psychopathic killer.
How does El Angel compare to other 2018 movies?
It ranks #21 of the 325 films from 2018 we've scored; their average is 20. The wokest is Return (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.