Soledad Villamil

In The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), Soledad Villamil makes Irene Menéndez Hastings’s attraction to Ricardo Darín’s Benjamín Espósito clear without continually signalling it. Their restraint gives the frustrated romance enough weight to hold our interest even when the crime drama wanders. We were moved by their attraction because both make holding back feel difficult. There is pleasure in the humour, too: Villamil can let it emerge without sacrificing Irene’s dignity.

Before that wider recognition, she had played Laura in Same Love, Same Rain (1999) and Natalia in the independent crime drama A Red Bear (2002). Her film and television work began in the 1990s, and emotionally reserved women recur in her dramas. The risk with such parts is that composure becomes the whole performance. Irene avoids that: the humour matters as much as the attraction, giving Villamil something to do besides keep a feeling under control.

Director Juan José Campanella does not always give the actors enough room. Federico Jusid and Emilio Kauderer’s music sometimes pushes the romance towards melodrama when the actors have already done the necessary work. The effect is to make Villamil’s performance seem less delicate than it is, and Campanella’s more emphatic storytelling creates the same problem. This is still a satisfying crime drama, but the interruptions are instructive about what she contributes. When a performance has made us believe in an attraction so readily, it seems perverse to keep adding reminders of how much it matters.

Her later parts include the psychiatrist in A Twelve-Year Night (2018) and Saula in Goyo (2024). Those credits take the work beyond the role that remains most associated with her, but Irene is still the performance we would send someone to first. Watch for how comfortably Villamil and Darín allow humour into a romance built on frustration. When the music starts pressing the point, the actors have usually made it already.