Review: ‘Wild Tales’ Explores the Blurred Limits of Morality

The Times critic Manohla Dargis reviews “Wild Tales.”

As high-spirited as its title suggests, “Wild Tales” opens on a savage note and ends, well, that’s for you to find out. In between its shocker start and equally startling windup, this Argentine anthology offers up a scabrous, often unsettlingly funny look at human behavior in extremis. It’s a mad, mad social Darwinian world, churning with men and women who, whether pushed a lot or just a little, are all eager to do the worst to one another. They pounce and then they pummel, engaging in drag-down fights that leave them black and blue and sometimes stone-cold dead.

Comedy both leads and bleeds in “Wild Tales,” which starts with a slinky number, Isabel (María Marull), roller-boarding onto a plane and into an unexpected reunion. It turns out that the unctuous guy across the aisle, Salgado (Dario Grandinetti), knows her former (never seen) boyfriend. A music critic, Salgado once sat in judgment of the boyfriend, to whom the critic had happily delivered a soul-crushing critique. An older woman seated nearby, overhearing their conversation, pipes in that she too — wouldn’t you know it? — was acquainted with the boyfriend and so it goes as one passenger after another echoes the same refrain. Just as each realizes that they know the same man, the plane banks and a queasy mix of dread and understanding begins ricocheting from face to face and then ….

“Til Death Do Us Part” WITH: Érica Rivas (Romina) and Diego Gentile (Ariel).

A version of this review appears in print on February 20, 2015, on page C10 of the New York edition with the headline: Pushed to Edge, and Into a Blurred Morality. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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