Pablo Trapero makes films about ordinary people inside institutions that do not care about them, and he is admired for making ensembles of compromised people convincing. His first film in English, & Sons, is the one where too few of them come to life.
Fi1m perspective
Pablo Trapero's people are usually up against something bigger than they are: a police force in El Bonaerense (2002), a prison in Leonera (2008), the lawyers who circle road accidents in Carancho (2010), a family that runs kidnapping as a trade in El Clan (2015). He does not lecture about any of it. The institution is the weather and the film watches what ordinary people do in it, which is where his interest in what he has called "this really fuzzy boundary with reality" comes from. Daily life in his films keeps tipping into the absurd or the dangerous without anyone announcing it.
He has produced his own work since founding Matanza Cine in 2002, three years after his first feature, Mundo Grúa (1999), and the two jobs go together. He builds ensembles, often around Martina Gusmán and Ricardo Darín, and he is better than most at making a compromised person understandable without asking us to forgive them. His use of existing songs, set against scenes they have no business accompanying, is the other thing critics reliably notice, and El Clan is the film they point to. After two decades of that he took on television, with episodes of ZeroZeroZero (2020) and Echo 3 (2022), and then his first English-language feature.
That is where we came in, and where we part company with most critics, whose view of him is uniformly warm. & Sons (2026), adapted from David Gilbert's novel with Sarah Polley, has the Trapero subject: a difficult family seen close up, with more sons than the film has time for. It also has Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, and their exchanges have the force his ensembles are known for. But the screenplay leans on an explanation we will not describe and could not believe, and Noah Jupe, George MacKay and Johnny Flynn are left with too little to become people. The editing, which Trapero shares with Gemma Cabello and Thom Smalley, holds back where the film needed pushing. We sat through the last half hour waiting for one more scene as good as Nighy and Staunton's, and grew tired of waiting, which is a strange thing to feel in a film by a director whose reputation rests on making everyone in the frame count.
One film in a new language is not a verdict on a career, and the earlier work is where his admirers would send you. He has said the language of a film does not matter, only what the characters say. On the evidence of & Sons, it is what they are given to say that needs the attention.
Biography
Pablo Trapero is an Argentine film director, producer, editor and screenwriter. He was born on 4 October 1971 in San Justo, Argentina. His debut feature Mundo Grúa (1999) won the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In 2002 he founded the production company Matanza Cine.
Trapero's subsequent features include El Bonaerense (2002), Familia Rodante (2004), Nacido y Criado (2006), Leonera (2008), Carancho (2010), White Elephant (2012), The Clan (2015) and The Quietude (2018). He has also directed episodes of the series ZeroZeroZero (2020) and Echo 3 (2022). The Clan earned him the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice.
& Sons (2025), his first English-language feature, was written and directed by Trapero; he also served as producer and editor. The film stars Bill Nighy and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
