“When you are young and fall in love, love seems perfect. Friendship, on the other hand, is a much more complex bond than love.”

Anchored in the premise of a coming-of-age story, Benjamín Naishtat constructs Glaxo around seemingly familiar territory: youth, friendship, and that first love born with the intensity of a time in life when everything feels definitive. From a place of innocence, his characters believe that these bonds might remain intact in the face of time. But this is only the starting point for taking us into much more complicated and treacherous territory, where the film speaks about generational trauma and wounds that never heal.

Based on the novel of the same name by Hernán Ronsino, the director builds a screenplay that speaks about memory, betrayal, and collective trauma. Glaxo moves with surprising narrative fluidity across several decades of Argentine society. Through the eyes of Flaco, Miguelito, Lucio, and Bicho, we not only see four adolescents coming of age; we witness events that would definitively mark an entire country. The upheaval of puberty coincides with social unrest, war, repression, and military brutality. Against this backdrop, the film constructs a nonlinear story steeped in suspense, anchoring all its strength in a secret that, at times, functions as a MacGuffin, carrying us across its different periods.

From the outset, Flaco (Esteban Bigliardi) tells us that this is a story about betrayal. He becomes our narrator and guiding thread. The force Bigliardi brings to the character is one of the film’s greatest strengths. His Vardeman dominates every scene, through his dialogue as much as his body language. His silences are powerful, and in the close-ups, we see a soul crushed by time and deception. What the director proposes through this character’s arc allows the film to transcend drama and thriller, bringing it closer to an existential reflection. It is in his inability to detach himself from the past that the character finds his true dimension. Flaco is not simply someone who remembers a betrayal; he is someone who has become trapped inside it.

In Glaxo, that wound that refuses to heal becomes the perfect analogy for the collective trauma of a country. Naishtat turns that memory into a permanent presence that contaminates the present, giving each fragment of the story a different weight as we gradually understand what is truly at stake. Individual pain ultimately reflects a much broader pain, one belonging to a society that has also been unable to close its own wounds. The past remains alive because, deep down, it has never stopped being part of the present.