A Yard of Jackals

What does authoritarianism sound like, and what do you do when those sounds start to leak through the walls of your living room? With his pulse-raising directorial debut, Chilean film editor Diego Figueroa applies those questions to the early years of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship, craftily adapting the narrative conventions of the political thriller genre to a more intimate and unsettling psychological register, foregrounding the thick layer of paranoia that mediates every interaction under junta rule. Raúl Peralta (Néstor Cantillana), a mild-mannered architectural model maker who works as a military contractor, finds his tenuously peaceful cohabitation with his bedridden mother disrupted by the arrival of mysterious new tenants in the adjoining row house, whose unseen nighttime activities keep the neighbors awake at all hours with a noisy racket that sounds suspiciously like violent intimidation. When the authorities reject his pleas for intervention, an increasingly disturbed Raúl must take it upon himself to gather evidence and seek answers, all while evading the attention of an oppressive police state. Cantillana—a frequent collaborator of fellow countrymen Sebastián Lelio and Pablo Larraín—delivers a performance of slow-burn intensity in the vein of Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation, perfectly suited to Figueroa’s claustrophobic, densely evocative rendering of 1970s Santiago.