Trenque Lauquen · reception & legacy

How Trenque Lauquen has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A four-hour Argentine mystery that premiered quietly in Venice's Orizzonti sidebar in 2022, then snowballed through pure cinephile word-of-mouth until Cahiers du Cinéma crowned it the best film of 2023 — from festival footnote to instant canon in about a year.

What's debated

The perennial fight is over its length and its ending: is the four-hour, two-part structure (and the refusal to hand you answers) the whole point, or an endurance test dressed up as profundity?

Its footprint

It's become cinephile shorthand for the El Pampero Cine ethos — no-budget, years-in-the-making, novelistic epics from Argentina — and a go-to rebuttal whenever someone claims long slow movies aren't worth it; its two-part theatrical release was treated as an event by art-house crowds.

Where it stands

A certified Letterboxd darling and canon climber — the 2020s 'you must see this' title that separates casual watchers from the truly committed.

Named by the director

Influences Laura Citarella has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• Vagabond (1985) — Citarella cited Varda's film about a lost woman reconstructed through other people's contradictory accounts as a model for how her protagonist exists only in different versions.