A scene from the movie Wild Tales. Photo / Sony
Revenge, served at various temperatures, is the unifying theme of this Oscar-nominated Argentinian compendium of six blackly comic short films making a welcome return from last year's festival.
All concern attempts to get even that go wildly out of control, though there are telling differences of tone between the six,
from the absurdism of early Woody Allen to an almost Chekhovian fatalism.
This close to the Germanwings disaster, the first story raises a laugh that may turn sour in the mouth: a plane load of people discover too late that the one thing they have in common is that they all pissed off the same person. But later episodes are purely and cathartically funny.
At times they may deliver vicarious pleasure to the most even-tempered of us: in a brilliantly controlled blend of suspense and slapstick, an episode of road rage escalates with alarming speed; a man who gets his car towed away once too often just happens to be an explosives expert; a waitress in a restaurant recognises a diner as the man who destroyed her family and he gets something worse than spit in his food.
But slowly we realise that simmering beneath the surface of the stories is a shared sense of the malaise in the Argentinian social order, of rage at the corrupt wielding of power that leaves the individual helpless.
