‘27 Nights’ review: Daniel Hendler’s colourful drama contemplates attitudes to ageing

Dir. Daniel Hendler. Argentina. 2025. 108 mins. 

A real-life episode of elder abuse becomes a gentle but spiky apprentice-mentor buddy story in this Argentinian comedy-drama from Uruguayan actor-director Daniel Hendler. Less than a month after the Venice premiere of his fugitive-cop comedy-thriller A Loose End, this likeable but less distinctive title premieres in competition as the opening film in San Sebastián before heading to Netflix in mid-October. Despite its generic feel, a laidback personal touch from Hendler, who also stars, should prove agreeable for streaming audiences in Spanish-speaking territories and perhaps beyond.

Hendler is nicely paired with veteran performer Marini

The film is based on a 2021 novel by writer and psychoanalyst Natalia Zito, which recounts in fictional form an episode that happened in Argentina in 2003; the case of a woman whose family committed her to a mental institution against her will. In Hendler’s version, the woman is 83-year-old Martha Hoffman (Marilú Marini), a wealthy, widowed art collector and former dancer. 

Renowned as a free spirit in her youth, Martha still delights in the company of a boisterously transgressive bohemian crowd. Her penchant for giving away expensive items to her friends – and the prospect of her squandering their inheritance – so concerns her daughters that they arrange to have her forcibly interned in a psychiatric hospital. “I’m not spending a single night here,” complains Martha, just before the film’s title flashes up on screen with brutal irony. Her 27 days and nights in the hospital, where she is denied contact with friends, are intercut with events following her return to her flat, where she is just as much a prisoner.

While the hospital sequences recount Martha’s interactions with other patients and with officious, condescending staff, the rest of the film focuses on middle-aged psychiatrist Leandro Casales (Hendler), appointed by a court to establish whether or not Martha has dementia; his verdict will help determine whether she will be placed permanently in care. Sweet-natured, shambling, ineffectual and very repressed, Leandro visits Martha at home with a list of tick-box questions, but soon finds this quick-witted, fundamentally subversive woman taking control and conspiring to loosen him up. This she does with the help of her boho buddies in a centrepiece sequence at their warehouse hangout – with Leandro learning to unbutton his collar, his psyche and even his libido.

The focus on Leandro allows viewers, through his journey of discovery, to question their own entrenched attitudes to age, to mental health and to social proprieties – although this strand of the film follows a standard emotional-apprenticeship arc, familiar from countless upmarket feelgood films. Indeed, you could well imagine 27 Nights remade with Steve Coogan in the Leandro role, opposite some eminent British doyenne.

As it is, Hendler’s hesitant, dishevelled demeanour and restrained rather than forced emphasis on Leandro’s shyness bring colour to what might have been a schematic characterisation. He is nicely paired with veteran performer Marini, a fixture in Argentinian and European cinema since the early 70s, her recent work including 2021’s Nocturna diptych and Benito Zembrano’s Lemon And Poppy Seed Cake. Her Martha is impishly charismatic – but rather than stressing the grande dame imperiousness, Marini plays her with a quizzical gentle touch, a lilting, soft delivery belying Martha’s harder edges.

Overall, this is a thoughtfully mounted showcase for some strong character playing, with Carla Peterson and Paula Grinszpan impressive as Martha’s daughters – respectively, a haughtily controlling bourgeoise and an easily swayed neurotic – and Julieta Zylberberg as the canny assistant assigned to Leandro.

Hendler himself co-writes, with input from experimental director Mariano Llinas (La Flor), a previous writing collaborator with this film’s producer Santiago Mitre. The script isn’t afraid to underscore a few obvious points and emotional beats, but its fragmented, twin-thread structure allows a little more suppleness than its otherwise familiar crowd-pleaser trajectory might suggest.