The Secret in her Eyes - treatment of the memory of trauma

built around the notoriously repressive state violence of the 1970s. But instead of treating this highly charged theme in a way that might reflect its real legacy—three decades of immunity for the perpetrators and the continued atomization of the populace and its political agency—the film climaxes with an unrealistic fantasy-fulfillment revenge against a single sadistic agent of that earlier violence. The seeming arbitrariness of this ending prompts a question: Why apply a nullifying finish to a film centered on a graphic account of such an important episode in the nation’s history—the military junta’s “Dirty War”—one that continues to resound in the national political discourse some thirty years later with the recent prosecutions of agents of state violence during the dictatorship?

The film employs as spectacle the universally acknowledged brutality of the most recent Argentine military dictatorship—part of the film depicts the predictatorship period of Isabel Perón’s brief government and the viciousness of its paramilitary apparatus, the continuity of which is acknowledged to extend beyond the subsequent coup d’état—while declining to explore in a productive way the currently pressing question of the memory of the dictatorship and its crimes.