‘A Loose End’ review: Daniel Hendler’s cop-on-the-run comedy is a deadpan delight

Director/scr: Daniel Hendler. Uruguay/Argentina/Spain. 2025. 95mins

Uruguayan actor Daniel Hendler’s third film as director is a Spanish-language cop-on-the-run comedy that ropes in Western, thriller and rom-com elements. It’s not always easy to sustain audience interest in a whimsical road movie like this but, despite some longueurs, A Loose End mostly succeeds, partly thanks to an empathetic central performance by Sergio Prina as Santiago, a penniless fugitive in a foreign country who begins to realise that the experience can be strangely liberating, a chance to start over.

There’s universal pleasure to be had in the film’s inventive vision of a fugitive

As an actor, Hendler is perhaps best known for his long working relationship with Argentinian director Daniel Burman, and there is something of the gentle, sometimes absurdist humour of the pair’s best-known collaboration, Lost Embrace (which earned Hendler a Best Actor award at the 2004 Berlinale) in A Loose End. The film, which last year won San Sebastian’s WIP Latam Industry Award while still in development, premiered in the new Spotlight section at Venice and could well charm itself into a few arthouse berths even outside of its primary market in its three co-production territories: Uruguay, Argentina and Spain.

For a good while, the film keeps viewers guessing about who Prina’s policeman character Santiago is, and why he’s on the run. One of the methods deployed by Hendler’s fine, lean script is to swap around the sequential blocks of his journey in a way that adds up only gradually. Another is to make this flight something of a meander, without ever quite forfeiting the thrill of the chase.

It’s clear early on that the mild-mannered Argentinian corporal is being pursued by two bad-apple colleagues who he knows too much about: for them, he is literally a loose end in need of tying up. But when Santiago enters a duty free shop on the border with Uruguay, searching for a way across the frontier that doesn’t require him to show ID, this in-between space becomes the setting for a tenderly flirtatious encounter with Pilar Gamboa’s shop assistant.

Once over the border, Santiago dallies at a cheese truck run by a lugubrious guitar-strumming character played by real-life Uruguayan musician Alberto Wolf (aka Mandrake Wolf). It’s not obvious why Santiago knows so much about cheese – the film is refreshingly devoid of backstory – but he clearly does. Later, his curds-and-whey expertise will help him talk his way into employment at a cheese factory.  

Shot cleanly, with few camera movements, to play up the deadpan tone, A Loose End is scored by spare, jagged bursts of electric guitar with the reverb turned up high. There’s plenty of thematic reverb too: discussions about astrology and the stars that are peppered throughout; the way Santiago very gradually divests himself of his police uniform by swapping single pieces of it with people he meets along the way; even in the names of two of the places Santiago travels to on his Uruguayan odyssey – Mercedes (‘mercy’) and Dolores (‘sorrows’).

Hendler’s winsome, touching comedy is not above the occasional local joke, including one centring on the herbal drink known as mate that will no doubt resonate more with Latin American audiences. But there’s universal pleasure to be had in the film’s inventive vision of a fugitive who turns the dangerous frontier into a place in which to unburden, change and grow.