Overlooked: Luis Ortega’s “El Angel”

The styles of Tarantino and Almodovar meet in this mesmerizing, highly fictionalized account of an Argentinian serial killer

Few things match being captivated by a film about which you knew nothing going in, and that feeling is amplified when the screening is taking place in Havana, at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Cuban audiences are invested in their filmgoing experience in a way that is unmatched. It was there, last year, that I caught Luis Ortega’s El Angel, knowing only that it was about an Argentinian, baby-faced killer. Nothing, not even the rain dripping down from the theater’s leaking ceiling, could divert our eyes from the screen.

If Tarantino and Almodovar collaborated on a film, the result would certainly be something close to this. The story of real-life serial criminal and murderer Carlos Robledo Puch, it ravishes the audience with 70’s decor and music, bursts of extraordinary violence and boundary-pushing sexual fluidity. It is a subversive joy-ride that doesn’t shy away from revealing the empty soul at the center of its own beating heart.

A colorful, comic book version of the story of Argentina’s most notorious murderer, the film opens with the teen skipping out on school to break into a…