Wild Tales (2015) — Argentina

By Dan Clendenin

           In this award-winning film, the writer and director Damián Szifron collects six short stories. The stories are unrelated, except that they are all black humor, and they all feature violent revenge. Just when you think things couldn't get crazier, the stories descend deeper into absurdity. In "Pasternak," everyone on a plane knows the pilot, who exacts his revenge for how they all mistreated him. In another, a waitress puts rat poison in the meal of a man who ruined her family. A story of road rage goes very bad. Simon wages a futile battle against municipal bureaucrats, and ends up a hero in prison for his personal revenge mode. "The Proposal" tells how a wealthy man paid off the prosecutor after his son committed vehicular manslaughter. The last story is a wedding from hell, which actually ends with a redemptive kiss and dance. Wild Tales was nominated as Best Foreign Film in 2015.