Among the sunny rooftops of Buenos Aires, life repeats itself every day, always the same. Get up, get dressed, get on the subway, grab a quick coffee and immediately head back to the bank to count banknotes, issue checks and cash them. Sometimes there are some setbacks, which however never seem to upset those gray lives like the suits worn. “There are people who have the same life” – it is specified at the beginning of the film. At least until the idea of ​​the century happens to be implemented. Because perhaps "it is better to spend 3 and a half years in prison than 25 in a bank." Thus a modest employee steals a large amount of money from the credit institution where he works, a sum equivalent to his salary up to to retirement, an ideal compromise to escape the monotony of an alienating and never satisfying job, that tragic and oblivious imbalance already excellently told in the recent TV series Severance (Scissione in Italian) on that mutilated hope of an employee divided precisely in (and from) the capitalist world.
In short, a robbery that transforms everything into something else, certainly not a detective story or even a thriller, or rather perhaps more its very slow denial, a very human and humanist film about the desperate search for freedom, beyond all borders. Morán and Román: colleagues and unwitting accomplices, criminals with headlines more for having attacked their usual daily lives than the bank in which they work, parallel anagrams of ordinary lives that change and upset the order of the usual letters, sarcastically recounting the point with the calculator geography of one's existence. From the cold and suffocating windowless vaults to the boundless landscapes of Argentina in which to breathe again. From crowded streets to run in (“we live to work”) to the slow contemplation of nature. Both guided by a third anagrammatic and paradigmatic figure to fall in love with: Norma, who in the free and rural land dedicates herself to cinema.

With an operation that at times is all too explicit and overabundant in the images and dialogues (expanded over 3 hours and 3 acts), Los Delincuentes recovers all the most typical melancholy of the New Argentine Cinema, immersing it with a pinch of irony (between coincidences, misunderstandings and the same actors playing different characters ) in the bucolic dreaming of the future, obviously now in jeans and on horseback. But to truly achieve that much-desired freedom, perhaps it will be necessary to completely change the letters of one's life, anagrams will not be enough, palindromes will not be enough, and perhaps not even a film will be enough. “Where is freedom?”

From Il Buio In Sala - Report of the 41st Torino Film Festival (2023)