Prosecutors Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín) and Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani) led an unlikely team of young paralegals in the 1985 landmark Trial of the Juntas which sought to bring justice to the victims of the National Reorganization Process, a military dictatorship which ruled over Argentina from 1976-1983. Julio and Luis faced a lot of danger in taking on this case, one of the first of its kind in Latin America in which a newly installed democratic government sought to criminally penalize the leaders of an ousted dictatorship, but their pursuit of justice against all odds inspired a sense of hope for the countless victims of the regime. 

Premiering at the Venice International Film Festival, Argentina, 1985 was later submitted by Argentina to the Academy for Best International Feature. The historical drama is directed by Santiago Mitre who co-wrote the script with Mariano Llinás and Martín Mauregui and found its widest international release as part of Amazon Prime’s exclusive streaming library. At 140-minutes, the film is surprisingly breezy in the sense that it is not as legally dense as one might expect as it focuses much more on the emotional stories of the victims and their families, bringing to light the horror that The Process wreaked over the country that led to the coining of the phrase of the people “Never Again” as a call of remembrance of these atrocities and to always seek truth and justice. It is the latest entry into an emerging subset of drama that seeks to reckon with a country’s painful past which often led to swathes of people being tortured, killed, or otherwise disappeared by agents acting on behalf of their own government: Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers (2021) follows a significant subplot in which a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War is exhumed, and both César Díaz with Our Mothers (2019) and Jayro Bustamante with La Llorona (2019) grapple with the lingering feeling of loss in the wake of the Guatemalan Civil War and the cultural scars it left behind.  

Argentina, 1985 breaks the story through Julio, showing him as an accomplished lawyer and a family man with his wife Silvia (Alejandra Flechner) and two children Veronica (Gina Mastronicola) and Javi (Santiago Armas Estevarena) at home. What is nice about the script is that these three characters are not just used as emotional collateral for later in the film as they are issued a security detail and need to move to a temporary safe house, but they all have ongoing subplots to contend with as the narrative unfolds. This allows us to see Julio as a more human force and not just a no-nonsense lawyer which is a trap many legal thrillers oftentimes fall prey to. The courtroom savviness is certainly there, but it is refreshing to see behind closed doors some of the fears and doubts Julio is contending with in addition to navigating home life with a teenage daughter who is dating and a young son who idolizes him. 

The importance of showing this life outside of the courtroom is made even more apparent when Julio’s arc is compared to Luis’ turn in the film. The only real subplot which Luis is given is the change of heart his mother (Susana Pampín) goes through from being someone who was staunchly pro-military to someone who wants to see the accused found guilty and punished for their crimes. It is an important and pivotal moment within the film, for sure, as it is a sign that Luis is doing the right thing, but it keeps his entire development as a character tied to the case and as such the script treats Luis more as a tool than a character. Even Luis’ own growth within the film is intrinsically tied to his relationship with Julio and how much credit the experienced prosecutor affords the green behind the ears lawyer. 

Mitre and his writing team have the benefit of history that allows Argentina, 1985 to be a timely underdog story of a younger generation seeking change from a system that historically would protect oppressors. They employ a lighthearted assembling the team montage where the ambitious young paralegals are interviewed by Luis and Julio and while their answers are played for a bit of levity before the film becomes entrenched in the trauma of the people, it does highlight an important notion that new blood is necessary to enact change in society. A forest without undergrowth is destined to die, and in the same way, our societies need young and visionary talent to further our progress, hopefully towards a better and more just future. 

Films like Argentina, 1985 are sometimes difficult to talk about because they require a careful separation from the craft of filmmaking and the important facts that they are seeking to disseminate, further complicated when drilled down to separating an individual performance by an actor from the actual life of the person they are representing on screen. In this case, the film strikes a nice balance between the two goals – to be informative and to be entertaining – but it lacks some of the explosiveness of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) or courtroom fast talking present in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992). Julio delivers a rousing and inspiring closing argument, but for the most part, Argentina, 1985 finds the legal team riding in the backseat once in the courtroom and allows the victim’s testimony to play out in a series of harrowing monologues. Notably, Mitre does not cut away to reenactments of the torturous activities being tried, but instead relies on his actors and Javier Julia’s constant camera and a few careful cuts from editor Andrés P. Estrada, to deliver the message. In this way, the film is more a document than it is entertainment, but there is enough narrative meat outside of the courtroom that it does not feel like a confused documentary; it is just lacking some of the punch that has come to be expected from courtroom dramas. This decision not to sensationalize the proceedings is admirable, but when viewed as a film the middle act does become quite stated during the testimony especially given the shot construction is often head-on and for long takes. 

Despite the slight identity crisis, Mitre and his team tell an important story, and through streaming, it is brought to a wide audience with ease. It suffers the same fate many adult-skewing dramas do in today’s landscape; getting the word out about the film and with only a brief awards qualifying run, marketing for the over-two-hours- long subtitled drama was virtually nonexistent. For those who follow the international scene, or for those who are daunted by subtitles but adept enough with their remote to change their language settings, they will be rewarded with an incredibly handsome-looking film that does not get too complicated about what it is trying to do. Unlike the many legal thrillers of which it borrows much of its identity and visual language – just look at any one of the John Grisham adaptations, especially ones from the 80s – Mitre is not seeking to pull one over on the audiences but is much more interested in shedding light on a painful part of Argentinian history and giving voice to the families of the loved ones who lost their lives to The Process.