This is the second and sadly last feature film from Bielinsky, who died shortly after completing it, following the highly entertaining and smart Nine Queens, made in 2000. Although retaining his love of puzzles and the fitting together of an intricate plot, which made Nine Queens such a pleasure, this follows a far darker and more troubled path.

Esteban is an introverted taxidermist who suffers from a form of epilepsy, of which the ‘aura' of the title is a symptom, a feeling of heightened reality combined with an inability to act, which precedes a loss of consciousness. A kind of perverse release from responsibility, and the ultimate disconnection from ordinary life. Only during these moments, he later explains, does he feel truly alive. He seems pretty disconnected already - his marriage is clearly in trouble, his wife, whom we have only seen as a blurred shape through a bubbled glass door, soon leaves him, and his mind is mostly taken up with the harmless and totally theoretical plotting of perfect heists. His friend, whose own marriage is problematic, to say the least, takes him on a hunting trip to introduce a little machismo into his life and, as the phrase has it, take him out of himself.

It does. In the woods, things change. To someone whose job is to make dioramas of wildlife scenes for museums, the forest is dislocating and alien, and he struggles to enter into the hunting spirit expected of him. But then he is responsible for an accidental death, and this triggers a recklessness and eager engagement with crime as he takes on a false identity. Simultaneously he is ‘adopted' by a strange, wolf-like dog with disquieting heterochromatic (two differently coloured) eyes who becomes almost his familiar, at once homely and sinister, devoted pet and sheep killer (a wonderfully brooding presence by the splendid ‘Eva').

But his longing for the heightened rush previously felt only in his aura experiences leads him into uncharted territory, as his ability to pick up signals, memorise, and bluff his way into actual criminal activity, while clearly fulfilling an almost cerebral need, leads him into some very messy and dangerous situations. Ricardo Darin, with his perpetual guarded frown and look of someone who only expects ever to be disappointed in life, onscreen for almost the entire film, is splendidly unknowable as the self-absorbed ‘hero' who puts behind him the controllable sphere of stuffed dead things and takes on the world of real life and death.

Bielinsky's bravura camerawork excels at presenting the world from Esteban's viewpoint, the existential Nausea of the aura, the clammy fear of discovery, the horror of the power of life and death. It's too long, at over 2 hours, and could profitably have been sharpened in parts, but is never less than dynamic, a noir of great quality, amoral, bleak, and intensely satisfying.