Invasion · reception & legacy

How Invasion has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Barely seen for decades — the dictatorship made sure of that, with chunks of its negative stolen in 1978 — it was restored around the turn of the millennium and is now routinely ranked among the greatest Argentine films ever made.

What's debated

The perennial fan debate is what it even is — sci-fi? dystopia? fantastique? — and whether its story of a city quietly besieged eerily 'predicted' Argentina's state terror seven years before the coup.

Its footprint

Its fictional city of Aquilea — Buenos Aires made strange — has become a cinephile shorthand for the paranoid city, and the Borges connection gives it a literary afterlife few films enjoy: Borges himself described it as the legend of a besieged city defended by men who may not be heroes.

Where it stands

A holy-grail cult object of Latin American cinema — for years a film more discussed than seen, now a badge of deep-cut cinephilia on Letterboxd.