The Aura, 2005

It's hard to review The Aura without comparing it to Nine Queens, the only other feature film from the regrettably late director Fabien Bielinsky. Both are intricate heist films starring the same lead actor (Ricardo Darin, who's especially riveting in this, playing a clever but mild-mannered man who would love to mastermind a robbery and inadvertently gets his wish), both require a great deal of suspension of disbelief, and both are so fantastically well-made that you won't care how far-fetched they both are (which is more than I can say for Criminal, the lifeless American remake of Nine Queens). The similarities end there, however, as the two films are night and day in terms of tone, pacing, and depth. Where Nine Queens is a breezy but complicated con job of a movie in the same vein as The Sting (boy, I compare a lot of movies to The Sting), The Aura is, conversely, a dark, meditative thriller with an open ending that, if interpreted a certain way, kind of excuses the many astounding coincidences found in the plot. The fact that both films work so well is a true testament to both the versatility of the director and the tragedy of never knowing his untapped potential.

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