Available on DVD: “Carancho”

Martina Gusman and Ricardo Darin in Carancho

Set in a featureless corner of Buenos Aires called La Matanza, Carancho dives into a nocturnal world of crooked lawyers and broken people.

After informing us that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for Argentines under 35, Pablo Trapero’s insinuating thriller introduces the bottom feeders who profit from vehicular tragedy. Among them is Sosa (Ricardo Darín), a personal-injury lawyer waiting out the temporary loss of his license by working for thugs who scam victims out of the bulk of their insurance settlements. But when one of the ambulances he’s chasing opens to reveal Luján (Martina Gusman), a harried young doctor chasing demons of her own, Sosa begins to reassess his priorities.

Giving vivid life to a satellite industry that preys on the vulnerable, Carancho (the title means “vulture”) unfolds among the corrupt and the desperate, on damp nighttime streets and in bouncing ambulances. At heart an unlovely love story illuminated by sudden flares of violence, the film reeks of hopelessness and moral destitution, offering its lovers few means of escape.

Luckily Darín has some experience playing a character trapped by his past, and as Sosa trawls for cases in morgues and emergency rooms, his gray face hovering over sheet-shrouded gurneys, he looks less like the scavenger of the film’s title than like a weary prisoner of his own mistakes.