Walter Donado (Sony Pictures Classics)

Spoilers can be a hurdle when writing about any plot-heavy movie. And for a twist-driven anthology film like Wild Tales, there are six plot lines I can ruin for the potential viewer. I wish I hadn’t learned about some of them before I saw the movie, so if you have any interest in seeing it—and I recommend you do—stop reading now.

Director Damián Szifron’s film begins with a curious string of coincidences. Passengers on an airplane start to talking to each other and discover that they are all connected to the same vengeful man from their past, who happens to be in the cockpit. As the plane starts its fateful dive, the wide screen composition cuts to a retired couple sitting in the comfort of their back yard, the camera never losing sight of them as they and the viewer gradually become aware of what’s coming.

The Argentinian black comedy was among the nominees for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, and frankly, it’s a darker film than the Academy usually recognizes. The opening credit sequence is made up of vivid color photos of wild animals—the use of a fox forever associated with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Chaos may reign, but at least half of Wild Tales’ six segments are well-designed studies in payback. From a sharp opening vignette in which a musician gathers his enemies onto one doomed passenger jet, to the man who stages a solo revolt against the DMV, most of the film’s segments come off as delirious revenge fantasy.

The movie’s first segments build a simmering and satisfying tension of resentment and release, not just of blood but of other bodily fluids. But by the fourth segment, the tension is longer and more complicated, but not necessarily better. Vengeance is at its visceral peak in the third segment, which follows the driver of an expensive sports car (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and the driver of a beat-up jalopy (Walter Donado) in a series of one-upmanship that comes off like a road rage incident between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. It makes you wish Szifron would adapt the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan story.

Wild Tales turns from scatological cartoon violence to bureaucratic vigilantism in its next segment, in which Simón (The Secret in Their Eyes’ Ricardo Darin) starts a one-man revolt against a tow-truck happy DMV. Instead of ending on his note of vengeful triumph, it continues with Simón’s success on social media, and as the movie goes on. revenge takes on diminishing returns.

The class divide that comes through in the road rage incident is brought to a head in the film’s fifth segment, about a wealthy couple who pays off their groundskeeper to take the fall for their son, who was involved in a hit-and-run accident. But as the director spends the first half of the movie arousing bloodlust in the viewer, the film’s final segments turn the table on the animal urges he encouraged earlier in the film: “So, you like revenge?” I imagine Szifron telling the audience in a thick accent, “Well see what it does to you! It eats you alive! It’s not so much fun is it now, huh?” Wild Tales is an exciting, gory ride that gets heavy-handed and loses steam, but there’s more than enough to satisfy the lust for blood and entertainment.

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Wild Tales
Written and directed by Damián Szifron.
With Darío Grandinetti, María Marull, Mónica Villa, Ricardo Darin
Rated R for violence, language, brief sexuality and bodily functions.
Running time 122 minuts
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row, E Street Cinema, and AMC Shirlington.