★★★☆☆
A family plots to kill the man who murdered their daughter: a slow, morbid Uruguayan reckoning that uncurls down every dark alley.
Jeremias Segovia graduates from the shorts circuit (La mujer rota, Tooth Fairy, La hora azul) to a striking feature debut, and picks the bleakest possible subject for it. Sweet Violence aka Dulce Violencia turns on a long-deferred act of revenge: a group of grieving parents set out to have the man convicted of murdering their daughters killed, just as he is released, twenty years served, still protesting his innocence and trying to rebuild a life.
Segovia, working from a script by producer Juan Martín Alonso, plays it as a slow burn suffused with dread, dark and morbid and melancholy, the sense of threat seeming to uncurl down every unlit alleyway. It’s a mood piece as much as a thriller, and the vibes are immaculate: crisply shot and cut, patient to the point of ache, and carried by a set of superb, weathered performances led by Esteban Bigliardi as the maybe-guilty man haunted by his past (but befriended by a very good dog).
The moral ground keeps shifting underfoot, the further the parents go the murkier their righteousness becomes. Some will find the ending unsatisfying, a withholding of the straightforward catharsis a revenge premise seems to promise, though that refusal feels deliberate rather than evasive. If you like your Latin American genre cinema slow and morally knotted, and you don’t need your vengeance neat, it rewards patience.
Sweet Violence played at Tubi FrightFest in London.