The HSBC Spanish Film Festival 2025 is currently touring eight Australian cities, showcasing a range of new Spanish and Latin American films. Among this year’s titles is Argentinian thriller A Silent Death (Una Muerte Silenciosa), directed by Sebastián Schindel. It is well shot and performed, but it also charts its path through very familiar territory. For the viewer seeking a Scandi noir fix, but who don’t mind getting in from Patagonia, this bleak little number may be just the ticket.

Deer hunter and guide Octavio (Joaquín Furriel) wakes from a drunken night of alcohol and sleeping pills to discover an apparent murder on his doorstep. Working his way through his small mountainous town, he obsessively works to find a perpetrator – and a cause.

Furriel delivers a lot in his intense, messy turn as Octavio. The character as written is a cavalcade of overly familiar archetypes. A car crashed damaged him so that he cannot sleep, and saw his brother killed. He lives on a cocktail of booze and drugs, and makes a living escorting rich foreigners on local deer hunts. When his niece Sofia (Sol Wainer) is discovered dead from a gunshot wound, it sends him on an obsessive journey familiar to most viewers of these kinds of miserable, snowy murder mysteries. What is on the page is honestly rather repetitive and worn, and it is essentially up to Furriel to provide the idiosyncrasies and the depth.

The supporting cast is similarly adept at finding the best possible angles for their characters, with a uniformity that reflects well on Schindel (The Wrath of God, The Crimes that Bind) as director. Guillermo Nieto shoots the piece slickly, and with a good eye for night scenes: much of the film involves people staggering or sneaking around in the dark, and he makes it all bleakly easy on the eye.

It is striking how omnipresent firearms are in the story. Soon a specific weapon becomes a focus in Octavio’s search, only it has gone missing – and seeking it out feels like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. There is strange sort of lax attitude to gun safety that, for this viewer at least, seems shockingly lax.

It is, ultimately, the script that draws it back. It is not simply a little stereotypical: the pace feels slightly off, leading the film to feel a good 20-30 minutes long than it actually is. Likewise there is a sense that some of the film’s extended circle of supporting characters get overlooked once they are surplus to the narrative. Better use of them would have likely filled the story while helping the film as hole to maintain its pace.

This is a solid genre work, and should easily find an appreciative audience, but it is only that and little more besides. Viewers seeking something more elaborate or distinctive are going to need to look elsewhere.