General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Last Days of the Victim

The Last Days of the Victim (Últimos días de la víctima) is a 1982 Argentine police thriller directed by Adolfo Aristarain, adapted from José Pablo Feinmann's 1979 novel of the same name. It follows Raúl Mendizábal, a hit man working for anonymous clients, who is hired to kill a man named Rodolfo Külpe and discovers during the surveillance that he is only a piece in a larger game.¹^•² The film premiered in Argentina on 8 April 1982, five days before the invasion of the Falkland Islands, and its commercial run was ruined by the war.¹^•³ It is the third film of Aristarain's police trilogy, after La parte del león (1978) and Tiempo de revancha (1981).⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenplay	Adolfo Aristarain; screenplay by Aristarain and José Pablo Feinmann, based on Feinmann's novel¹
Source novel	Últimos días de la víctima, written by Feinmann in 1977–1978 and published in December 1979⁵
Argentine release	8 April 1982; rated PM18; Eastmancolor, sound¹
Runtime	90 minutes per the Argentine film database; the Spanish ICAA registry lists 94 minutes¹^•⁶
Lead cast	Federico Luppi (Raúl Mendizábal), Soledad Silveyra (Cecilia Ravenna), Julio De Grazia, Ulises Dumont, Arturo Maly (Rodolfo Külpe), Elena Tasisto, Enrique Liporace, China Zorrilla¹
Production	Héctor Olivera and Luis Osvaldo Repetto for Aries Cinematográfica Argentina; cinematography Horacio Maira, music Emilio Kauderer, editing Eduardo López¹^•⁷
Awards	Cóndor de Plata 1983: winner for best director and best adapted screenplay, nominee for best film⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Mendizábal is a professional killer who works for clients who never reveal their identity. He receives the assignment to eliminate Rodolfo Külpe, a 30-year-old man who lives alone, and must investigate him because little information is available. As he watches Külpe, the routine of surveillance turns into obsession: Mendizábal feels strangely drawn to his target. The appearance of a mysterious blonde woman linked to his previous victim leads him to suspect that something does not fit in this job.¹ In the obsessive, precise pursuit he discovers that he forms part of a game that is not his own, a chain serving larger interests.²

The film builds its suspense through the mechanics of watching. A significant sequence shows Mendizábal renting a room in a boarding house across from Külpe's apartment so he can carry out the killing; the camera holds on him at the window, then tracks forward to reveal the apartment opposite with a direct view. Observation of a human target is the axis of the film, and what is visible is mediated by objects and devices such as the camera with which Mendizábal photographs his victim's intimacy; apart from the climax in the apartment, the characters are never face to face.⁹ A contemporary Uruguayan review noted that dialogue practically does not exist, and that what there is serves an exact purpose, from the seemingly casual remarks of a suspicious friend to the almost melodramatic phrases of Külpe's wife, with whom the protagonist nearly begins a relationship.⁷

From novel to screenplay

Feinmann wrote the novel in 1977 and 1978, during what he described as the most violent and tragic period of Argentina's history, and it was published in December 1979.⁵ In September 1981, after the success of Tiempo de revancha, Aristarain telephoned Feinmann to say he wanted to film the novel; the two men did not really know each other.¹⁰

A collaborative adaptation. Aristarain later described the writing process as simple and pleasant: each wrote material, they met, reviewed everything, and continued. Feinmann, unlike a novelist protective of his book, agreed to change a great deal.¹¹ The adaptation removed everything the novel had of the metaphysical and made Mendizábal a man contracted by the military. Aristarain recalled that when Federico Luppi stops his car in front of a sign reading "Zona militar" and then meets men who speak English, there was no need to dress them as soldiers; the reference was clear without naming the regime.³ Aristarain said of the finished script that it contained nothing a censor could point to, so there was nowhere to cut: "If you didn't like it, you had to ban it."¹²

Political reading

The film was made during the last years of Argentina's military dictatorship (1976–1983), and critics have read its crime story as a portrait of the regime's machinery. Commentators noted that audiences of the time recognized in Mendizábal the prototype of the "manpower" the military used for dirty work such as kidnapping, torturing, and killing citizens suspected of subversion.¹³ A 1982 review in La Nación concentrated on Mendizábal, the cold hit man who showed no remorse when torturing and killing his victims, and connected his itinerary through Buenos Aires spaces, from high-rise apartments to shacks by the highways, from ominous offices to seedy hotels, into an environment in which political and economic corruption found in him an instrument.¹⁴ Scholarly work on the film describes it as a traditional, crystalline police film that pays tribute to classic genre procedures while making the act of surveillance itself a cinematographic problem.⁹

Release and reception

The film premiered in Argentina on 8 April 1982.¹ The timing was disastrous: "We released it and five days later they invaded the Malvinas. Then everyone forgot about the film, it was a disaster," Aristarain said.³ In 1982 the film circulated widely on the festival circuit: it was awarded at the festivals of Montreal, Cartagena de Indias, Biarritz, Huelva, and La Habana, and was presented at Cannes in the Quincena des Réalisateurs section.¹⁵^•¹⁶ At the Cóndor de Plata awards of 1983 it won best director and best adapted screenplay and was nominated for best film.⁸ It was preselected to represent Argentina for the Academy Awards the following year but did not reach the nominations.¹³

In Spain the film reached theaters only in 1986, four years late, in a poor print and with almost no publicity, which the critic Ángel Fernández-Santos of El País called hard to understand for a work he described as a thriller of great purity, a story of cold, spiraling violence that moves smoothly along the rails of credibility.¹⁷ Retrospective assessments have been more generous than the film's initial commercial fate: El País later called it one of the great Argentine films in history.¹²

Later adaptations

Feinmann's novel has been filmed three times. The first is Aristarain's 1982 version; the second was directed by Héctor Olivera in 1988 as Two to tango / Matar es morir un poco, produced within Aries's co-production arrangement with Roger Corman's companies; and the third, by Bruno Gantillon in 1994, starred Niels Arestrup as Mendizábal and Assumpta Serna.¹⁸^•¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026