Synopsis
Six independent episodes, bound together by the sudden eruption of a violence that has long been simmering beneath the surface of normality. A commercial flight turns into a trap orchestrated by a man determined to take revenge on those who ruined his life; a young waitress recognizes in a restaurant customer the man responsible for the destruction of her family; a trivial episode of road arrogance escalates into a fierce confrontation between two motorists; an engineer, harassed by a blind and obtuse bureaucratic machine, transforms his frustration into an explosive act; an affluent family tries to buy impunity after a tragic accident, auctioning off conscience and dignity; finally, during a wedding reception, a betrayal triggers a marital implosion that turns into an emotional war engulfing bride, groom, and guests. Through grotesque and black comedy, the film portrays how fragile the boundary is between civil coexistence and barbarism.
Review
8 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 05. July 2026
The Man is Antiquated
(Günther Anders)
Six autonomous stories, united by a single subterranean current: the moment in which the fragile surface of civil coexistence tears apart and reveals what culture, education, and social conventions attempt in vain to contain. In a sequence of paradoxical, grotesque, and ferociously comic situations, Wild Tales transforms small and large everyday conflicts into eruptions of rage, revenge, and self-destruction, constructing an unsparing portrait of a humanity incapable of mastering its impulses. Damián Szifrón orchestrates six variations on the same theme: a seemingly insignificant detail is enough for order to dissolve and for civilization to reveal its precarious nature.
There is an invisible, almost imperceptible instant in which civilization ceases to be a conquest and returns to being a mere illusion. Wild Tales emerges precisely at that breaking point. The film does not depict violence as an extraordinary event, but as a permanent possibility of the human being. A humiliation, a queue at a counter, a denied right of way, a fine, a betrayal, or a word spoken at the wrong moment is enough for the fragile edifice of rationality to collapse under the weight of instinct.
The film absolves no one. It builds neither heroes nor absolute victims. It prefers to observe ordinary individuals as they slide, with an inevitable yet absurd logic, into a spiral in which the desire to be right outweighs the desire to live together. Comedy arises precisely from this imbalance: everything appears ridiculous because it is terribly plausible.
1. The Invisible Passenger: When Resentment Becomes Destiny
The first episode is a perfect narrative machine. Apparently unrelated people discover they are connected by a single figure, a man whom life has systematically rejected and humiliated. Chance gradually turns into a disturbing geometry, revealing a revenge plan constructed with almost mathematical precision.
The episode speaks of the memory of humiliation. No offense ever truly disappears. Every act of superficiality toward others can sediment within someone until it becomes an identity.
We often underestimate the weight of our daily actions. For those who receive them, a joke, a judgment, or a rejection may never truly end.
2. The Restaurant: Private Justice as Moral Temptation
A waitress recognizes among the customers the man responsible for the ruin of her family. The cook, elderly and lacking any trust in institutions, considers the immediate solution: eliminating the problem.
Here Szifrón puts the very concept of justice on trial. When the law seems to protect the powerful, revenge takes on the deceptive appearance of moral balance. But precisely at the moment when violence seeks to restore order, it produces only further chaos: evil is not interrupted simply by changing who holds the knife.
3. Desert Road: Ego as a Weapon of Destruction
Two motorists clash over a trivial provocation. Neither is willing to give way. What could have been a few seconds of argument becomes a primitive war.
The car becomes an extension of identity, in this case a phallic one. Every overtaking maneuver is perceived as a personal offense, every horn as a declaration of war. There are no longer individuals, but territories to defend: contemporary narcissism.
Many conflicts do not arise from ideological differences, but from the inability to endure even the smallest wound to pride. The ego, when it insists on always winning, turns any road into a battlefield.
4. Bombita: Bureaucracy as a Factory of Rage
Probably the most universal story. A man who respects the rules is progressively crushed by an administrative apparatus that seems incapable of distinguishing justice from procedure.
The real antagonist is not a person but the mechanism of bureaucracy itself. No one appears truly evil; each applies regulations, shifts responsibility, defers to another office. It is precisely this absence of a culprit that makes the system unbearable.
Szifrón suggests that institutions can produce violence without raising their voice. It is enough to turn human beings into filing cases.
When the individual loses his name and becomes a number, rebellion ends up appearing as the only way to reassert existence, even if it takes destructive forms.
5. The Price of Innocence: Money Buys Everything, Except Conscience
A young man runs over and kills a person. From that moment, a negotiation takes shape in which money attempts to rewrite reality: guilt changes ownership, responsibility becomes an economic variable, and every conscience appears to have a precise price.
This is arguably the most merciless story in the film, because it does not stage a sudden explosion of violence, but something far more refined and disturbing: the progressive dissolution of ethics within the logic of exchange. No one appears truly evil. Everyone reasons. Everyone calculates. Everyone believes they are making the most convenient choice. And it is precisely this apparent rationality that produces the deepest moral decay.
The episode seems to dismantle, one by one, the foundations of Kantian ethics. For Immanuel Kant, human dignity has no price because it belongs to the realm of ends, never means. A human being cannot be used as a tool to achieve personal advantage. Here, however, the opposite occurs: people are continuously converted into means. The employee can be sacrificed to protect the boss’s son, the truth can be manipulated to preserve wealth, justice can be bought as long as its cost is lower than the economic damage of honesty.
Corruption does not begin when someone accepts a bribe; it begins when every principle becomes negotiable. When everything can be purchased, even conscience ceases to be a compass and becomes just another budget line.
6. The Wedding: Love as the Final Arena of War
The final episode turns a wedding reception into a progressive demolition of social conventions. Elegance dissolves, romance gives way to ferocity, and guests witness the disintegration of the ritual meant to celebrate the beginning of a shared life.
Szifrón shows how thin the boundary is between love and possession, desire and domination, sincerity and spectacle. Marriage, a symbol of social order, becomes the perfect stage for releasing everything normally repressed.
Perhaps relationships survive not because they are perfect, but because they manage to endure chaos without pretending it does not exist. Love, when it persists, is not born from the absence of emotional violence, but from the ability to look it in the eye.
In a trajectory that crosses the most ruthlessly anthropological contemporary cinema — from Parasite to The Square, from Force Majeure to The Hunt, and up to Funny Games and Triangle of Sadness — the same obsession emerges: civilization is never a given fact, but a fragile compromise that fractures as soon as personal interest, fear, or ego collide with shared rules. In this perspective, as in Szifrón, ethics appears not as a solid structure, but as a temporary suspension of instinct.
A Dark Comedy on Homo Sapiens
The most striking aspect of the film is that each episode could seem excessive, were it not built on experiences belonging to anyone’s life: an endless queue, bureaucratic abuse, traffic, humiliation, offense, betrayal. Szifrón does not invent madness; he simply amplifies it. He pushes to the extreme what already exists in attenuated form in everyday life.
Irony thus becomes a philosophical device even before a comic one. The viewer laughs because they recognize these mechanisms within themselves. They laugh at the arrogant driver, the obtuse bureaucrat, the corrupt rich man, the obsessive avenger—only to realize that none of these figures belongs to a separate category of humanity. They are possibilities inscribed within the same human structure.
“Man is not a gentle creature.”
(Sigmund Freud)
(Sigmund Freud)
It is here that the film acquires a surprising depth. Civilization does not appear as a natural human quality, but as an extremely fragile equilibrium. Education, law, morality, language, even common sense, appear as thin containment devices—dams built over a much older material. Before being moral subjects, we are living organisms; before reflection comes reaction; before thought comes impulse. Biology does not disappear with culture: it simply learns to wear its clothes.
Szifrón suggests that Homo sapiens has developed highly sophisticated technologies without truly emancipating itself from its own evolutionary grammar. Behind the professional, the magistrate, the engineer, the politician, or the entrepreneur, there still breathes a territorial, narcissistic, competitive mammal, ready to defend its space, status, and privileges with an intensity that often precedes any reasoning. Reason arrives later: almost always to justify what instinct has already decided.
In this sense, the film is less pessimistic than it seems, yet realistic. It does not claim that man is evil by nature; it shows rather how elementary he is. Our presumed intellectual superiority is constantly disproved by the ease with which a missed right of way, a fine, an insult, or a betrayal can dismantle centuries of education, philosophy, and law. A trivial detail is enough for the animal to reclaim its place behind the mask of the person.
The real comedy arises precisely from this disproportion. We build legal systems, moral codes, institutions, constitutions, and refined ethical discourses, only to behave as if the survival of our ego were the most decisive issue in the universe. It is a form of anthropological banality: the human being assigns cosmic value to his own small interests, turning minor incidents into personal wars and daily frustrations into absolute tragedies.
Wild Tales thus becomes a philosophical experiment. It gradually strips away layers of social respectability until what remains is exposed: an extraordinarily intelligent animal, still unable to fully detach itself from its biological origin. Perhaps this is the silent punchline running through the entire film: man likes to define himself as sapiens, but too often still behaves as an organism that reacts before understanding, strikes before reflecting, and exists long before truly learning to think.
“Every man carries within himself a sleeping criminal.”
“Civilization is the infinite effort to find remedies for evils that would not exist without civilization.”
(Emil Cioran)
“Civilization is the infinite effort to find remedies for evils that would not exist without civilization.”
(Emil Cioran)
