Adrian LeDuc is the British owner of a revival house in Buenos Aires, and, apart from his mother, the core of his emotional life is cinema—especially classic American films and their stars. The story opens with him in his theater, absorbed in the closing moments of Touch of Evil, the kind of film that seems to hold his world together even as his finances fray at the edges.
As his cinema slides deeper into debt, Adrian puts out a call for a roommate to help share the rent. After screening several applicants, he meets a confident American, Jack Carney, who agrees to move in. The shy, reserved Adrian LeDuc is at once drawn to and unsettled by Jack, whose self-assurance and outward charm feel both inviting and threatening. Jack, for his part, seems to sense the power dynamic and nevertheless develops a warmth toward his new landlord, quietly winning his trust.
Jack befriends a few of the neighbors, and Adrian grows increasingly wary, telling Jack that the people around them aren’t to be trusted. Yet Jack keeps engaging with them, building bonds, including with Laura, a neighbor whose husband is frequently away. Laura Werpachowsky becomes a pivotal figure in their small orbit, and the tension between Adrian’s insecurity and Jack’s growing social life begins to blur the lines of friendship and control. Claudia, the ticket seller at Adrian’s cinema, operates with a political committee that is investigating a string of murders echoing the tactics of Argentina’s death squads from the recent dictatorship era. Claudia’s presence ties the intimate world of the theater to a much larger, unsettling national history.
Adrian’s unease deepens when he discovers that Jack has been lying about his employment, feeding Adrian’s paranoia that he might be spying on him. He rummages through Jack’s room and uncovers photographs of Jack dressed in paramilitary attire. When Jack returns, he soothes Adrian’s agitation, yet the discovery seems to ignite his own suspicions that Adrian might have invaded his privacy. The couple’s quiet tension mirrors the broader fear that permeates their city.
Though he tries to keep a defiant distance from politics, Adrian approves Claudia’s committee’s use of his theater to screen footage relating to the murders. The horror comes when he sees a sign in the film that matches something from the photos he found in Jack’s room. Jack, recognizing that Adrian’s suspicions are rising, fabricates a plan to leave Argentina by altering Adrian’s passport. The plan founders, however—the passport is expired, and Jack cannot simply slip away. In desperation, he murders a young man to obtain another passport, attempting to paste his own photos into the dead man’s document, but the effort is bungled.
During this turbulent period, Adrian is shaken by the death of his mother, a blow that leaves him vulnerable and inflamed with emotion. He drinks heavily and creates a disturbance in his apartment, which unsettles the neighbors. The following morning, a television report about the murder of a young man leads the neighbors to suspect Adrian’s involvement, and they assault him when they confront him in his home. Jack returns and tends to the badly injured man, complicating Adrian’s fears and complicating Jack’s claimed innocence.
At his mother’s funeral, Claudia recognizes Jack from the death squad photos, confirming Adrian’s worst fears. When Adrian returns home, he finds Claudia dead—killed by Jack. A distraught Adrian, terrified of losing Jack even as he is horrified by Claudia’s murder, helps Jack dispose of the body. On their way out, they encounter Laura and her husband, who asks for an alibi. Jack suggests he’s headed to California with Adrian, and the two men leave the apartment together.
Back home, Adrian wavers between fear and attachment, and he ultimately reaches for Jack’s gun. The struggle that follows is brutal and intimate: Jack knocks the gun away, and as Adrian again Clifford-style aims to pull the trigger, Jack goads him with the fateful line, “Do it,” before a shot rings out. The dust settles slowly over the apartment, and a few days later, Laura appears again, asking for Jack’s address in California. Adrian, choosing silence, says he hasn’t heard from him and returns to the now-quiet table, pouring two glasses—one for himself and one for Jack’s corpse, which sits beneath the same roof they shared.
The film closes on a stark, unsettling image: outside Adrian’s cinema, now transformed into a porn theater, a large crowd has gathered. Adrian LeDuc stands in the doorway in a shirt and Jack’s black leather jacket, a cigarette in hand, a visible shift from the suit-and-tie persona he wore before. The final moment suggests how power, desire, and fear can reshape a life—and a city—into something unrecognizable.
