A tango for modern rage.
WILD TALES (RELATOS SALVAJES) is not a film about violence so much as it is a film about permission. Permission to snap, to retaliate, to stop performing civility when the social contract has already been broken—quietly, repeatedly, and with a stamp. Damián Szifron’s 2014 anthology doesn’t ask whether rage is justified; it begins from the assumption that rage has already been earned. What follows is not chaos for its own sake, but six tightly wound thought experiments about what happens when people finally stop absorbing humiliation as a civic duty.
Anthology films often live or die by imbalance—one standout segment, one that overstays its welcome, one that feels like a sketch rather than a story. WILD TALES avoids that trap through discipline. Each episode is engineered with almost surgical clarity: a single grievance, a clear escalation, and an ending that lands with cruel inevitability. Szifron knows exactly when to cut. The restraint is as important as the excess.
The opening segment announces this ethos immediately. What begins as a mildly uncanny coincidence snowballs into something mythic, less a plot than a collective realization. The joke isn’t just that these people are connected—it’s that resentment itself is connective tissue. By the time the plane becomes a closed system of unresolved grudges, WILD TALES has already made its thesis clear: society functions by isolating anger, and collapse begins when it gathers.
That tension between isolation and accumulation runs through every story. Nowhere is it clearer than in Ricardo Darín’s segment, which remains WILD TALES’ emotional and thematic anchor. Darín plays a man who does everything right—polite, compliant, educated—and is rewarded with fines, indifference, and quiet contempt. His breakdown isn’t explosive at first; it’s methodical, almost courteous. That’s what makes it unsettling. WILD TALES understands that the most dangerous rage is not loud or impulsive, but patiently catalogued.
Importantly, WILD TALES never frames these characters as monsters. It frames them as citizens. People who believe in rules until rules reveal themselves as arbitrary, predatory, or selectively enforced. The film’s violence, when it comes, feels less like a moral failure than a bureaucratic inevitability. This is where the film’s Argentine specificity matters—not as caricature, but as lived experience. Szifron isn’t satirizing Argentina from above; he’s diagnosing it from within.
The road-rage episode strips masculinity down to its most fragile components: pride, territory, humiliation. What begins as macho posturing curdles into something feral, but WILD TALES never lets us forget how petty the inciting incident is. The escalation is absurd precisely because the stakes are microscopic. The violence doesn’t emerge from hatred—it emerges from wounded ego. The joke is brutal, and deliberately so.
Class resentment simmers elsewhere, most notably in the segment involving wealth, guilt, and convenient scapegoats. Here, WILD TALES is at its coldest. Money doesn’t insulate characters from consequences; it merely delays them, displaces them, or assigns them to someone else. The moral rot isn’t hidden—it’s transactional. No one is confused about what’s happening. That clarity is the horror.
And then there’s the wedding. Operatic, grotesque, and perversely joyful, it functions as WILD TALES’ release valve. By this point, the audience understands the rules: repression leads to explosion, performance leads to humiliation. The bride’s revolt feels less like madness than revelation. Social niceties collapse, hierarchies disintegrate, and what remains is raw, unsanctioned honesty. It’s the film’s most anarchic segment, but also its most strangely romantic.
What makes WILD TALES endure more than a decade later is not its shock value, but its accuracy. The targets are timeless: institutions that protect themselves, systems that confuse procedure with justice, cultures that reward patience until patience becomes self-erasure. The film laughs, but never dismissively. Its humor is defensive, communal—the kind of laughter shared between people who recognize the same pressure points.
Crucially, Szifron refuses catharsis as moral cleansing. Violence doesn’t fix the world in WILD TALES. It exposes it. The relief we feel as viewers is uncomfortable because it implicates us. We recognize ourselves not just in the victims, but in the fantasies of retaliation. WILD TALES doesn’t judge that recognition—but it doesn’t absolve it either.
In that sense, WILD TALES (RELATOS SALVAJES) is not a call to arms or a celebration of breakdown. It’s a reminder of how thin the veneer of order really is, and how much emotional labor is demanded to maintain it. Civility, the film suggests, is often just rage on a delay timer.
That’s why WILD TALES still hits more than a decade later. Not because we want to explode—but because, somewhere deep down, we understand exactly why someone else finally does.
