Oscar Martínez
Overview
Follows Boris, a charismatic tour guide who unexpectedly reunites with his estranged father Julián. Their tense and emotional encounters explore past wounds and the possibility of forgiveness.
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Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
The Geography of Regret
I’ve always found Marcos Carnevale’s films to be a little bit like the tour guides he depicts in *The Last Giant*: they are practiced, polished, and they know exactly where to point the camera to get the best reaction. But there is a shift here. In his latest outing, Carnevale stops pointing at the scenery and starts pointing inward, toward the quiet, jagged spaces between people who share a bloodline but not a language.
Boris, played by Matías Mayer with a desperate kind of nervous energy, is a man who makes his living narrating history. He leads groups through the city, smoothing over the rough edges of the past to keep his customers entertained. It’s a clean job. It’s manageable. But then Julián, his estranged father, reappears. Suddenly, the script Boris has been writing for his own life—the one where he moved on, where the past was just a closed chapter—starts to fray.
The film’s strength isn’t in the grand, explosive arguments you might expect from a reunion drama. Carnevale is smarter than that. He understands that the real damage in families happens in the moments where nothing is said. There’s a scene about halfway through where they’re sitting in a roadside diner. It’s not an "event" scene. Boris is trying to explain his current life—the job, the apartment, the partner—and Julián is just staring at his coffee. The camera doesn’t cut away. It just sits there, watching the steam rise, letting the silence expand until it becomes an obstacle on the table. Boris starts fidgeting, tapping his spoon, trying to fill the void with chatter, but it’s like watching someone try to bail out a sinking boat with a thimble.
Oscar Martínez, who plays Julián, has made a career out of playing men who are, for lack of a better word, heavy. His physicality is something to behold; he moves through these scenes with a deliberate, slow-motion grace, as if he’s physically dragging the consequences of his decades-long absence behind him. When he looks at his son, he doesn’t look like a man asking for forgiveness. He looks like a man who knows he isn’t entitled to it, but who is standing there anyway because he has nowhere else to go.
This is where the film finds its pulse. It avoids the temptation to turn the father into a villain or the son into a saint. They are just two people who don't know how to stand in the same room. As the *Buenos Aires Herald* noted in a recent assessment, "Carnevale manages to sidestep the mawkish traps of the 'reunion drama,' opting instead for a portrait of exhaustion that feels startlingly honest." I’m inclined to agree. The film isn't about solving the trauma. It’s about the exhausting labor of acknowledging that it exists.
There are moments when the pacing drags, perhaps a little too enamored with its own somber tone. I found myself wishing, just once, that Boris would drop the tour-guide mask and really scream. But maybe that’s not who he is. Maybe his refusal to break is exactly the point. He’s spent so long curate-ing his own history that he’s terrified of what happens if he lets the truth—messy, unorganized, and painful—come tumbling out.
Ultimately, *The Last Giant* leaves you with a question rather than a resolution. Can you really go back to a place you left? And more importantly, can you ever really forgive the person who taught you how to leave? By the time the credits roll, the wounds aren't healed. They’re just exposed to the light. And for a film as interested in the art of the performance as this one, that feels like the only ending that could possibly be true. It doesn’t offer a tidy exit through the gift shop; it just leaves you standing in the street, wondering where to go next.
I’ve always found Marcos Carnevale’s films to be a little bit like the tour guides he depicts in *The Last Giant*: they are practiced, polished, and they know exactly where to point the camera to get the best reaction. But there is a shift here. In his latest outing, Carnevale stops pointing at the scenery and starts pointing inward, toward the quiet, jagged spaces between people who share a bloodline but not a language.
Boris, played by Matías Mayer with a desperate kind of nervous energy, is a man who makes his living narrating history. He leads groups through the city, smoothing over the rough edges of the past to keep his customers entertained. It’s a clean job. It’s manageable. But then Julián, his estranged father, reappears. Suddenly, the script Boris has been writing for his own life—the one where he moved on, where the past was just a closed chapter—starts to fray.
The film’s strength isn’t in the grand, explosive arguments you might expect from a reunion drama. Carnevale is smarter than that. He understands that the real damage in families happens in the moments where nothing is said. There’s a scene about halfway through where they’re sitting in a roadside diner. It’s not an "event" scene. Boris is trying to explain his current life—the job, the apartment, the partner—and Julián is just staring at his coffee. The camera doesn’t cut away. It just sits there, watching the steam rise, letting the silence expand until it becomes an obstacle on the table. Boris starts fidgeting, tapping his spoon, trying to fill the void with chatter, but it’s like watching someone try to bail out a sinking boat with a thimble.
Oscar Martínez, who plays Julián, has made a career out of playing men who are, for lack of a better word, heavy. His physicality is something to behold; he moves through these scenes with a deliberate, slow-motion grace, as if he’s physically dragging the consequences of his decades-long absence behind him. When he looks at his son, he doesn’t look like a man asking for forgiveness. He looks like a man who knows he isn’t entitled to it, but who is standing there anyway because he has nowhere else to go.
This is where the film finds its pulse. It avoids the temptation to turn the father into a villain or the son into a saint. They are just two people who don't know how to stand in the same room. As the *Buenos Aires Herald* noted in a recent assessment, "Carnevale manages to sidestep the mawkish traps of the 'reunion drama,' opting instead for a portrait of exhaustion that feels startlingly honest." I’m inclined to agree. The film isn't about solving the trauma. It’s about the exhausting labor of acknowledging that it exists.
There are moments when the pacing drags, perhaps a little too enamored with its own somber tone. I found myself wishing, just once, that Boris would drop the tour-guide mask and really scream. But maybe that’s not who he is. Maybe his refusal to break is exactly the point. He’s spent so long curate-ing his own history that he’s terrified of what happens if he lets the truth—messy, unorganized, and painful—come tumbling out.
Ultimately, *The Last Giant* leaves you with a question rather than a resolution. Can you really go back to a place you left? And more importantly, can you ever really forgive the person who taught you how to leave? By the time the credits roll, the wounds aren't healed. They’re just exposed to the light. And for a film as interested in the art of the performance as this one, that feels like the only ending that could possibly be true. It doesn’t offer a tidy exit through the gift shop; it just leaves you standing in the street, wondering where to go next.