‘Glaxo’ Review: Benjamín Naishtat’s Period Drama Revisits Argentina’s Dirty War In a Not-Quite-There Period Drama — SkimNews
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- "Glaxo" adapts Hernán Ronsino's short novel into a period drama set across three years in 1950s Argentina, centered on fascist police officer Ramón Folcada (Marcelo Subiotto) and his wife La Negra Miranda (Lali Espósito), who begins an affair with a teenage boy.
- Benjamín Naishtat directed the film, his fifth feature, after 'Rojo' (2018) about Argentina's 1970s military junta and 'Puan' (2023) about the Argentine economic crisis.
- The film premiered at TIFF 2026 and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
- The reviewer finds that Naishtat's streamlining of the novel's four-POV structure removes rising stakes, and that the central romance lacks erotic heat despite a florid score by Shigeru Umebayashi, composer of 'In the Mood for Love.'
- Production took place in Brazil at the initiative of producer Rodrigo Teixeira despite recreating 1950s small-town Argentina, and features a standout scene where Folcada confronts two Mormon missionaries.
- The review praises a 'surplus of production design pleasures' and Naishtat's directorial craft, but concludes 'Glaxo' never quite fires.
Why it matters: Naishtat had been building toward populist accessibility — successfully bridging arthouse and wider audiences with 'Rojo' and 'Puan.' 'Glaxo' represents a stumble in that trajectory: the reviewer finds the adaptation's structural simplification strips out the tension that made the source novel compelling, even as the film retains Naishtat's political instincts and the auteur's instinct for adapting esoteric formalism to populist cinema.
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