Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of being found out, and the hiding of wads of cash all play an important role in the film. But The Delinquents is more like a slow cinema crime epic than the films it borrows these caper conventions from.

The three-hour-long film begins with a desire for cash and ends with a liberation of self. Morán (Daniel Elias) has spent a long career working at a bank, and he is still a long way off from retirement. We watch a day of his work life unfold, in all of its tedium and redundancy. The vault requires two people, two keys, and two pin numbers to enter. Papers must be stamped. Tellers must beg a favor of a co-worker if they want to leave early for a doctor’s appointment. The most exciting occurrence during this lengthy opening sequence is a woman who inexplicably signs her checks the exact same way that another client of the bank does.

Frankly, the environment of this bank is exceedingly boring. Yet, the minor boring events of this day directly lead to Morán’s successful robbery of the bank vault. When Román (Esteban Bigliardi) leaves work early to get a neck brace removed, he taps a more senior employee to take his place. This employee cannot leave the teller window to accompany Morán down to the bank vault, so instead he hands Morán his key. Despite the institution’s protocols, Morán is thus able to enter the bank vault alone and stuff his backpack full of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills. Interestingly, he looks at the security camera and appears unfazed.

Román is not Morán’s accomplice, but his leaving the bank is what allowed Morán to pull off the robbery. So when Morán approaches Román with a deal to split the money, he makes sure Román is aware that Morán could tell the authorities that Román was in on the heist all along. Morán needs Román, because Morán is going to turn himself in. He plans to serve a three-and-a-half-year sentence, and he needs Román to keep the money hidden until he gets released. Despite trepidation, Román agrees (mostly because he has no other option).

Morán’s argument to Román is that this money will be enough for both of them to comfortably retire. The goal was never to get rich; it was to live in peace. Moreno takes the mind-numbingly boring world of bank work, which he shows in great detail as part of the heist, and transforms it into an integral part of both the plot and the film’s central theme. It is a sneaky and clever gambit, the risk being that the slow development of this story and the banality of what we are watching can alienate the viewer. But I found it to pay off beautifully. The tedium of much of the first hour of the film gives way to a thrilling resolution, wherein Morán ironically appears most happy with his place in life right before he sends himself to prison.

The film is clever in other ways, too, but perhaps not to the same meaningful end. Crossfade transitions create visually striking juxtapositions, and the use of doubling (or quadrupling) of characters makes for humorous moments. But these intriguing pieces do not feel particularly coherent when placed as pieces in this psychological puzzle of a film.

In one instance, Moreno chooses to use one actor (German De Silva) to play two different domineering characters. In another, four characters share a lazy day at a river at the base of a mountain, and they also share very similar names (Román, Ramón, Norma, and Morna). The latter allows for the funniest moment in the film, but it feels like little more than a bit of clever wordplay. Still, these characters have a crucial role to play in the film (as do the two characters played by the same actor), and the mirroring of people is not devoid of meaning. At the same time, the film being so centrally about individual liberation from the monotony of middle- and lower-middle-class labor makes the linking of these characters to others appear odd.

Nonetheless, The Delinquents is one of the more intriguing films of 2023. Some will balk at its runtime, understandably so, but the film arguably requires its length to get its point across. And whether you enjoy the slowness of it all or not, it is hard to deny the beauty in the crafting of individual shots and transitions.

The Delinquents: B+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)