Benjamín Naishtat's fifth feature, "Glaxo," arrives as a departure from the Argentine filmmaker's recent momentum. After earning critical recognition with his previous two films, Naishtat turns toward period drama with this exploration of Argentina's Dirty War, but the execution stumbles where ambition ought to land.
The film takes its title from a pharmaceutical company, using that commercial entity as a lens through which to examine a turbulent chapter in Argentine history. Naishtat, working as both writer and director, constructs what amounts to a handsomely mounted production. The technical craft remains evident. The cinematography satisfies. The production design maintains period authenticity. Yet surface-level competence cannot compensate for narrative or thematic gaps that leave the work feeling incomplete.
The disappointment registers more acutely given Naishtat's trajectory. His previous two films demonstrated a filmmaker working at heightened creative capacity, generating the kind of critical buzz and festival recognition that typically signals arrival at a higher tier of international cinema. The expectation, naturally, follows that momentum forward. Instead, "Glaxo" retreats into safer territory, trading the distinctive voice that characterized earlier work for something that plays as a more conventional period piece.
The Dirty War remains a subject of enduring historical weight in Argentine culture and cinema. The conflict between the military junta and left-wing insurgents from 1976 to 1983 killed an estimated 9,000 to 30,000 people, with tens of thousands more disappeared. Argentine cinema has returned repeatedly to this material, with filmmakers like Luis Puenzo, Héctor Olivera, and more recently Astrid Menks and others examining different angles of trauma, complicity, and historical reckoning.
Naishtat's entry into this well-trodden territory needed something that justified its existence beyond formal competence. The pharmaceutical framing suggests a conceptual apparatus, perhaps examining complicity through institutional structures or the way commerce operates alongside atrocity. Yet the film apparently struggles to make that framing cohere into something that transforms the material rather than simply containing it.
For critics and industry observers, the letdown carries particular weight. Naishtat had positioned himself as a filmmaker worth following, someone whose sensibility was evolving in interesting directions. The IndieWire assessment as a "not-quite-there" work suggests a film that reaches but fails to grasp, that possesses the technical apparatus of serious filmmaking without the vision to deploy it meaningfully.
The film remains available for reassessment, and some audiences may find value that initial reviews overlooked. Yet the critical consensus emerging from major outlets indicates that "Glaxo" represents a step backward, a film that demonstrates why not every ambitious project reaches completion in successful form. For Naishtat, the question becomes what comes next. Does "Glaxo" mark a temporary misstep, or does it signal a broader creative recalibration? Naishtat's answer will arrive in whatever project follows this period drama that couldn't quite bridge the distance between intention and execution.