Synopsis
It’s 1948 and the Cold War has arrived in Chile. In the Congress, prominent Communist Senator and popular poet Pablo Neruda accuses the government of betraying the Party and is stripped of his parliamentary immunity by President González Videla. The Chief of Investigative Police instructs inspector Óscar Peluchonneau to arrest the poet. Neruda tries to escape from the country with his wife, the painter Delia del Carril, but they are forced to go underground.
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Cast
- Gael García BernalOscar Peluchoneau
- Luis GneccoPablo Neruda
- Mercedes MoránDelia del Carril
- Emilio Gutiérrez CabaPicasso
- Diego MuñozMartínez
- Alejandro GoicJorge Bellet
- Pablo DerquiVictor Pey
- Marcelo AlonsoPepe Rodríguez
- Michael SilvaÁlvaro Jara
- Francisco ReyesBianchi
Recommendations
- 100
CineVue
Gnecco has both breadth and subtlety. His Neruda is a complex and fascinating character study, a man fastidiously vain of his status but unconvinced by his own performance even as he enraptures a nation. - 100
Variety
Surprises always come at the end of Pablo Larraín’s films, when everything suddenly comes together and the audience sits in the cinema feeling both illuminated and floored. Neruda is no different, representing the director at his stunning best with a work of such cleverness and beauty, alongside such power, that it’s hard to know how to parcel out praise. - 91
The Playlist
A dexterous, mischievous, almost incomprehensibly intelligent film that has such invention packed into every frame that the only real danger is overload, Neruda works most thrillingly as an effusive love letter to the very concept of fiction and all the ways it can set you free, written in lyrical but staccato meter, perhaps with a rose between the teeth. - 90
We Got This Covered
An exuberant visual poem reflecting the life and politics of the Chilean poet, Neruda is much more than a simple biopic. - 85
TheWrap
Neruda raises thought-provoking questions, offers no easy answers, and does it in with top-notch performances and a cinematic style that is intellectually, artistically and thematically compelling. - 83
The Film Stage
As radical a reinvention of the biopic as Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, Neruda is Larraín’s most conceptual and also his most demanding film yet. Like Haynes, Larraín attempts to create a hybrid between his subject’s art and biography, and, like Haynes’ film, Larraín’s is generally more fascinating than it is enjoyable. - 83
IndieWire
Neruda turns all of the filmmaker's preceding statements on his native land into a unified whole. In essence, the film asserts that even as history passes into legend, it speaks to deeper truths. - 80
The Guardian
Neruda takes a lot of wild chances and, like the poet whose life acts as inspiration, it’s unwilling to play by the rules. Dizzily constructed and full of more life and meaning than most “real” biopics, it’s a risk worth taking.
