Starring Guillermo Francella. Rated 14A

As fascinating as a historical document as it is as a gruesome Scorsese-esque crime story, Argentina’s The Clan works most powerfully as a metaphor. Cold, sadistic Archimedes Puccio’s rule over his wife and children becomes a perfect symbol of the authoritarian leadership that took the country into its darkest years.

Director Pablo Trapero misses no chance to capture the political and social complexities that surround a true story that shocked the South American nation three decades ago. And while some of its intricacies might be lost on a foreign audience, his breathless, claustrophobic camera work, kitschy period details, and Tarantino-like use of ironic happy-go-lucky music from the era translate easily—and often horrifically.

When the movie begins, Argentina’s infamous Dirty War is ending, but, apparently, its “disappearances” aren’t. Puccio, who once worked as an intelligence officer for the military government, now kidnaps rich people from his neighbourhood, making big bucks from the ransom and rarely returning his victims in one piece.

What makes the story so remarkable is the model-father image he maintains: he helps his extended brood with their homework and obsessively sweeps his front sidewalk—all while hostages are brutally chained and gagged in his basement. Guillermo Francella does a chilling job of suggesting icy psychopathy behind the calm patriarch.

Here’s where such compelling questions of guilt come in. Puccio runs the house like a dictator, and everyone is either too scared of him or too comfortable with their upper-middle-class lifestyle to speak out. Trapero focuses most tightly on eldest son Alejandro (Peter Lanzani), an easygoing rugby star and surf-shop owner by day and forced accomplice by night. Tellingly, his father calls him a traitor if he complains.

In a film that works on so many levels, we ultimately find ourselves empathizing, disturbingly, with some of the perpetrators—and that has to be Trapero’s goal. He’s not just exposing the rot inside an epically messed-up family. He’s digging at how easily an entire nation became complicit.