CINEOS Premiere

Tony Manero

A man obsessed with becoming Saturday Night Fever's dancer kills without a flicker of feeling, in a Chile where the dictatorship has made exactly this kind of soul.

It deposits something cold in the chest and gives you no way to set it down — the killings are casual, the face registers almost nothing, and the film denies you any release valve, so you carry everything it accumulates. Disco laid over state-conditioned brutality keeps your body in a low, queasy discomfort throughout. Worst of all, it makes you live inside a mind that cannot feel other people as real, and that solitude walks out with you.