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Trailer for "The Aura"

How much does outside, off-screen knowledge about a movie affect the way we watch it? Although we may not want to admit it, I suspect the answer is: quite a bit. Fabian Bielinsky, the maker of the impressive new Argentine film The Aura, died suddenly of a heart attack a few months ago. He was only 47, and The Aura was only his second film: His first, the twisty con-game thriller Nine Queens, was a surprise arthouse hit in the US. (It was remade by Hollywood as Criminal with John C. Reilly.)

It’s impossible to watch The Aura without feeling a twinge of poignancy. If this is the kind of masterful touch Bielinsky had at the beginning of his career, what might he have created in decades to come if fate hadn’t been so cruel? We’ll never know, but there are some quietly haunting clues in this movie.

Unlike the fast-moving Nine Queens, with its mile-a-minute plot turns, The Aura is a different kind of crime thriller. It has a slow-burn build-up, which makes for a mood of constant and queasy uncertainty.

Esteban Espinosa (Ricardo Darín, who co-starred in Nine Queens) is a taxidermist prone to occasional epileptic fits. He nurses fantasies of pulling off the perfect heist. But in reality he’s a quiet and withdrawn introvert. A friend invites him on a hunting trip into the remote Patagonian forest in southern Argentina. An accident provides this introvert a chance to step into someone else’s shoes. And his long-cherished crime fantasy threatens to cross over into reality.

Right before he has one of his epileptic episodes, Esteban feels an “aura”—a lucid moment when the sounds and images around him rush into his head and register with a huge crystalline force. Ironically, these are the moments when he feels life at its sharpest and most vivid. The movie doesn’t just convey these feelings through words—it creates an audiovisual experience (as all good movies must) to express this complex emotion. Sound effects, camera movement, carefully composed images—they are all put to work to evoke the subjective state of this spooky but beautiful aura.

But no amount of technical dazzle can match the power of that endlessly interesting thing—the human face. Darin is a bear of a man with a face that looks like a map of the moon. Creased, ridged and stubbled, it speaks volumes of worry. Most of all, it’s his big, sunken, wet blue eyes that hold you in their tormented gaze. Since he says very little throughout the film, it’s the man’s eyes we look into in order to decipher who he is. It’s an eerie performance.

For all the loud bluster of standard thriller devices—nonstop action, chase sequences, high-octane violence—the movies that are truly hard to shake off are ones, like The Aura, that speak softly and only hint at the dread in their hearts. Often the best movies are those that you can’t fully figure out. Like life, they elude complete and total solution. And we value them all the more for it.