Argentinian Chattanooga Film Festival entry Buenas Noches/Good Night follows in the very underrated sub-sub-genre of films about terrible people. The film follows Laura (Rebeca Rossato) a young & average twenty-something woman who just flew into Argentina from Brazil – to assist her aunt with settling the estate of a relative. The only issue is, her aunt thought she arrived the next day and is still away on vacation. If things couldn’t get worse the airline lost Laura’s luggage, and after rebuking the advances of a much older uber driver, he drives off with her phone, wallet and money.
Stranded on her own, we promptly witness her go to a restaurant, eat, and then ask patrons to give her money, and a little extra to get through the night. It’s at this point thanks to Laura’s sense of entitlement, we get the idea that she might in fact not be the most sympathetic of protagonists. This is a sentiment cemented when she looks the other way when a pair of strangers she’s tagging along with early in the night, start looking for things to steal in a man’s apartment, who they went to hang with. While the man does actually turn out to be a much more terrible person than all three of them, writer/director Matías Szulanski is very clear to lock in our assessment of Laura, before he starts to raise the stakes throughout the night.
While Laura doesn’t TECHNICALLY kill anyone, she does however leave a trail of carnage and betrayal in her wake, which lands her on the run with 20 grand in cash about half way through the film. Buenas Noches/Good Night eases off the tension you’d expect from these ‘surviving the night’ films, thankfully because of how we’re introduced to Laura in that first act, which may be a stumbling block for some. She’s not particularly sympathetic, so her demise would not necessarily be the worst thing. So the bigger question becomes, will she make it to morning to see her aunt? It’s a question I was even beginning to ask myself in the film’s harrowing third act, when we notice a series of unfortunate happenstances start to stack up against Laura and consequences start to befall her.
Actor Rebeca Rossato purposefully keeps us at arms length from Laura, while director Matías Szulanski works his magic of making it impossible to look away. It’s not an easy balancing act, but it’s one that works out flawlessly as the film never quite lets Laura off the hook or loses our interest. Granted these kinds of films aren’t for everyone, but her expendability to the audience only makes her journey that much more intriguing, since you’re wondering just what she will do next. Buenas Noches/Good Night is a nervy exercise in schadenfreude and what you can do if absolutely no one is safe in your narrative, with an actor up for that task to not just be unlikeable but kind of an asshole. Definitely not for everyone, Buenas Noches/Good Night will transfix you with its trainwreck of a protagonist and her shocking misadventures that manage to conclude in the singularly best way possible.
