Like a marionette missing its strings, the equestrian Remo Manfredini spends much of the fickle dark comedy “Kill the Jockey” hanging inertly in center frame. The film opens on Remo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a onetime champion, enduring a midcareer crisis that finds him drinking and drugging before races. He seeks an antidote to his malaise in his romance with Abril (Úrsula Corberó), a fellow jockey, who serves as a plucky buffer for the self-saboteur against his ruffian boss, Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho).
The director, Luis Ortega, doesn’t give much reason to care about Remo’s conflict — the protagonist’s catatonia inspires the same in the viewer — and instead exhausts his efforts on a mannered blankness of style and mood. The action unfolds in composed tableaux, with lines delivered inexpressively enough to void them of meaning. The exception to the rule is Abril, who claims the movie’s heart by dint of being the sole character with one.
The movie’s second half finds Remo suffering a traumatic brain injury that inspires him to don a fur coat, old lady purse and smudged makeup, a decision that seems to have been driven less by narrative — as in a gender-bending Pedro Almodóvar tale — than aesthetic. As “Kill the Jockey” devolves into gangster mayhem, the whole story starts to feel unconsidered, almost perfunctory. Offering respite are scenes with Abril, especially one in which she and her friend Ana (the magnetic Mariana di Girólamo) shimmy and gyrate before a big race; their agility suggests that being a jockey is akin to dancing.
Kill the Jockey
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.
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