Starring Ricardo Darín and Martina Gusman. In Spanish with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, June 17, at the Vancity Theatre

Argentine star Ricardo Darí­n, who's starting to resemble a cross between Joe Mantegna and Leonard Cohen, was designed to play good men shaking off bad situations. In his biggest hit, The Secret in Their Eyes, he was a down-on-his-heels lawyer facing fascist administrators, a deadly killer, and his own romantic inhibitions. In Carancho, his character has fallen much further down the legal ladder.

After losing his licence for unexplained reasons, Sosa is reduced to literal ambulance-chasing; he follows the newly injured to rundown hospitals and clinics to sign them up for legal defence by The Foundation. This shady group wins millions for its clients, only to give them, and Sosa, leftover crumbs. (The film's title translates as Vulture.) Our beaten-down boy is trying to escape this trap when he meets Luján (Martina Gusman), an ER doctor whose chilly personality is well-suited to the roadwork that keeps her bumping into lawyers in the night.

In the Buenos Aires of writer-director Pablo Trapero (Rolling Family), everything seems to happen between midnight and 6 a.m., and most events—frequently bloody and distressing—are spied in harshly lit close-ups or hand-held tracking shots. Still, there are moments of grace and a few dark laughs in this lunar demimonde, especially when Sosa finally reaches the doc, herself beholden to the junk she shoots up to keep going.

The plot eventually muscles out the love story, though, and it manages to be both repetitive and increasingly complicated. The fixation on car crashes sometimes recalls David Cronenberg, although it surely says more about corruption and decay in modern Argentina than it does about anything auto-erotic. Too bad the throwaway ending thumbs its nose at these troubled souls—mainly because Darí­n and Gusman are too damn good to be reduced to flat symbols of anything.

Watch the trailer for Carancho.