Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Film Festival, Lorenzo Vigas’s debut feature intertwines psychological angst and romantic nurturing in a dark drama. Armando (Alfredo Castro), a middle-aged single man who makes dentures and is terrified by the prospect of physical contact, spends his free time walking the streets of Caracas and cruising for tough young men. His interest is less in sex than in power, as he seeks control over these macho boys in return for payment. The dynamic changes after he invites home a volatile car mechanic named Elder and the teenager refuses to play by Armando’s rules. Rather than move on to another conquest, though, the older man becomes bewitched, stalking Elder in the streets and eventually offering him a kind of home life.

Thus begins an elegantly gritty exploration of two confused and angry men negotiating a relationship that resides somewhere between that of lovers, friends, and father and son. Even as their domestic life gains stasis and balance, the power games that Armando seems unable to resist return to the fore. Vigas, in his debut feature, employs an assured sensibility, isolating his characters through the use of focus and close-ups and gaining a particular kind of emotional truth. The fine character actor Castro (a familiar face from Pablo Larraín’s films) gives Armando a mesmerizing watchfulness, while newcomer Luis Silva’s Elder is wound tight with unpredictable, feral physicality. Together they render their characters and the film resonant and unforgettably disturbing.