Writer: Benjamín Naishtat (from the novel by Hernán Ronsino)
Director: Benjamín Naishtat
The colourful romanticism of Americanised 1950s life in Argentina leads only to dreadful betrayal, suspicion and regret for the people of a local town in Benjamín Naishtat’s Glaxo based on the novel by Hernán Ronsino, screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026. The audience never learns what Glaxo is – although the association with the pharmaceutical brand is implicit – only that it is the name of the aspirational local factory that no one can get into unless they know someone. But the idea of Glaxo, a job for life, security and certainty are representative in Naishtat’s movie, of all the things lost to the characters whose lives are shaped by events in the town and who are subjected to the morality of this Technicolor noir.
When the alluring Negra comes to town with her much older ex-policeman husband, there are plenty of rumours about her origins but most of the young men are jealous. Soon her husband invites one of them, Miguelito to break in a wild horse for him and begins an affair, although he is soon drafted for the Argentinian army. A betrayal follows, earning him what he wants but decades late the past returns to hurt them all over again.
It is an interesting choice to name the film after a place that has no scenes set in it, is never the subject or direct focus of the film nor has any characters who actually work in it. Naishtat limits himself to occasional shots of the factory gates but its purpose in the film is far more interesting, a place that becomes a neverland for a time although later that a dream coming true may leave a lasting poison. Naishtat follows Ronsino’s novel, contrasting two time periods in the last 1950s and the late 1980s (several of the characters watch The Terminator at the cinema) to explore the changing political face of Argentina in this time with revolutions, overthrown dictators and social disintegration, all effectively emphasising this gap between hope and the reality that eventually arrives.
Naishtat takes the pulpy substance of the novel and turns it into a really enjoyable visual experience, and whether at the 50s dances held in the emptied swimming pool filled with bright fabrics, James Dean-like boys and already nostalgic crooner music, or the seedy neon lit hotel where Negra takes her lover in Buenos Aires. This contrasts with the darker, dryer colour scheme for the 1980s portions of the film using more brown and beige, often shot at night or in dimly lit rooms as individuals suffer the consequences of their choices.
With involving performances from Lali Espósito as the dangerously alluring and fantasy-like Negra who no one ever really knows, Marcelo Subiotto as her dangerous husband and Joaquin Bonadeo as the innocent Miguelito who is quickly out of his depth with them both, Glaxo is an enigmatic noir, a film that makes the audience work hard to piece it together as the residents of the town and the country fall apart.
Glaxo is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
