After the internationally acclaimed La casa del ángel (1956), Torre Nilsson got the green light from producers to shoot a story by Beatriz Guido, which a year before would have been met with diffidence. After the previous movie, Guido was Torre Nilsson’s screenwriter of choice, and with the dominant themes of her stories – the innocent malice of children, sexuality oppressed by social hypocrisy, the decadence of traditional families – she fed the rich narrative repertoire of Torre Nilsson’s movies over the following decade and, after his digression into period films, his last picture (Piedra libre, 1975).
Torre Nilsson directed this film with a freedom that was sporadic throughout his career. Instead of offering a realistic view of dropouts in the slums outside the capital, he develops a cour des miracles around the young couple, permeating a setting where poverty makes the sordid inevitable with a literary quality: a graveyard becomes a nighttime shelter for traffickers of stolen objects and its empty graves are rented to couples; a newborn, taken care of by kids selling pornographic postcards, lent to a beggar as a ploy for stirring up compassion, and used as a shield during robberies. If the protestant priest who goes mad after killing his sick child seems to be from another film, the children have a real presence and debuting actors María Vaner and Leonardo Favio, the future filmmaker of unparalleled talent, brought a fresh tone and new faces to Argentine cinema.
Criticized at its release for a lack of restraint (a pig eats a newborn, death as an imaginary kidnapper of a child killed by other children), El secuestrador is a unique work in the oeuvre of its creators, and it dialogues like no other film of its time with the independent cinema of the 2000s.