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Based on the novel by Edoardo Sacheri, the action of the film2 is set in 1974, just before the military coup in Argentina. The country is on the edge, ready to fall under a terrible dictatorship which will pervert justice and society in a reversal of values. Chaos and violence will prevail and some people, both victims and persecutors, will remain entrapped forever. This is the historical-political context of this beautiful film, a thriller and a story of love and hate, revenge and regeneration, whose complexity intertwines different levels of human interaction, from the public to the private.
The film tells the story of Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), a retired inspector of the Buenos Aires Court of Justice, who, 25 years later, wants to write a novel on the unresolved rape and murder case of a young bride, Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo).
At the time of the rape and murder, thanks to the widower Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago), to the judge, Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil), Benjamin's secret love, and to his alcoholic colleague Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), Esposito was able to arrest the murderer, Isidoro Gomez (Javier Godino), but the military Junta in power released Gomez, and proceeded to recruit him in the government's anti-subversive death squads. Despite this, and thanks to the perverse situation created by the dictatorship, Morales the widower, who had waited for Gomez to show up at the railway station for a whole year, secretly captured him and imprisoned him in an isolated country place. Morales had moved to this country house and made Gomez pay for his brutal crime, day after day, in the name of a justice Morales himself decreed. The cold case of Liliana Coloto still torments Benjamin as does his secret, suppressed love for Irene. Unable to cope with their differences in status and personality, they had failed to consummate their attraction and love for each other, but now they meet again when they each feel that there is no time to w