The Delinquents review – beguilingly surreal slow-motion Buenos Aires heist tale

Very few films make you ask “what just happened?” at the end – and also in fact “what is happening right now?” at various points during the running time. But this is what I said, out loud, in the course of this deeply strange, utterly distinctive, beguiling and fantastical shaggy-dog story about a bank robbery in Buenos Aires, from Argentinian director Rodrigo Moreno. If Pedro Almodóvar and Eric Rohmer teamed up to compose a meanderingly long heist movie it might look like this, but something in the film’s waywardness makes it very difficult to fit into the heist genre – or any genre.

The scene is a bank in the city, where Moran (Daniel Elías) has been joylessly working for years as a cashier; his long service and palpable dullness mean that he is entrusted with carrying large amounts from the tills to the safe. But Moran has worked out that he can with relative ease transfer sizeable sums into the strongboxes stored in cabinets behind the customer area, and from there into a humble backpack to take them home with him. Moran arranges to meet his similarly boring colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) for a drink in a bar and calmly makes him an offer, dumping a backpack bulging with cash at his feet: he will turn himself in to a police station, confess and do what he calculates will be a modest stretch of three-and-a-half years, while Román looks after the money. Afterwards, they will split the cash, enough to retire and quit the rat race. But if Román snitches, Moran tells him, he will tell the authorities they were in it together. Astonished, Román feels he has no choice but to take the bag of money home and hide it in the modest flat he shares with his music-teacher girlfriend, and begin his new secret life of crime.

But there are other narrative strands, surreally branching and subdividing. Moran and Román (the anagrammatic name-pairing hinting at a parallel universes and coincidences that they don’t even guess at) have a mean boss at the bank called Del Toro, played by veteran Argentinian actor Germán De Silva; and in jail, Moran is terrorised by a gang boss nicknamed Garrincha, also played by Germán De Silva.

While in prison, Moran tells Román that he in fact has also hidden some money near a stream in remote Alpa Corral in Córdoba province, and Román should get it. But the film loops off into a pastoral comedy territory when Román is distracted on his dangerous mission just when he should be tensely making his getaway, falling in love with a local woman, Norma (Margarita Molfino), who has a smallholding there and helping a friend make a film in the area. And an outrageous twist is to create another bizarre cosmic parallel.

It is at first possible to quibble about procedural implausibilities and plot-holes: could a bank robber really count on such a short sentence when the money hadn’t been recovered? Well, realist worries aren’t exactly the point here. This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown. The seriocomic taste of this film has to be savoured, like some little-known fortified wine, and there is something so seductive in this unlikely adventure. It shows us that bank employees, like all the other human beings we meet briefly and incuriously, have vivid and intense inner lives, just like everyone else, and a capacity for poetically rewriting their own identities. This could be a cult classic.

• The Delinquents screened at the Cannes film festival.