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Ardor may be an Argentinian thriller about wretched land-grabbers, but it’s hard to ignore the heavy “gunslinging West” influences scattered throughout filmmaker Pablo Fendrik’s eco-political PSA. Its structure is built on one single event, as Fendrik stretches out a family’s homeland defense story into an entire feature film (running at a questionable hour and forty minutes). Men are slain, shootouts are had, and blood is spilled in the name of property, but the film’s anti-stealing message is lost somewhere in a rogue warrior’s attempt to ward off menacing jungle criminals (in a less-efficient-Rambo kind of way). I’m sure that land-poaching is a huge problem in lawless thickets of foliage, but this is more about a slow-burn spectacle than it is environmental causes.

Gael García Bernal plays Kaí, a stranger who shows up at Vania’s (Alice Braga) residence shortly before a group of thugs...

A man of mystery arrives to save the day as murderous agribusiness representatives prowl the steamy jungle of northern Argentina

Although it’s set in the steamy, riverine jungle of northern Argentina, this Spanish-language drama is basically a western, except instead of cowboys v Native Americans, it’s murderous agribusiness representatives v smallholders.

Alice Braga plays a farmer’s daughter, abducted by evil Claudio Tolcachir, until Gael García Bernal, a mystery man with no name or shirt, comes to save her and help fight off the bad guys. No one actually says he’s of indigenous stock, but clearly he has a special, semi-mystical bond with the land and earned all the right badges in his jungle boy scout troop for trap building with shoots and vines and jaguar whispering.

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