Man Facing Southeast 1986

On a sunny summer day in 1985, the staff and patients move through the corridors of Buenos Aires’ José Borda Psychiatric Hospital, each routine moment quietly framing a story that will unfold with unexpected wonder. In the ward for non-violent delusions, an extra patient is discovered in the chapel, sitting at the organ and playing with a startling virtuosity. The hospital’s staff physician, Dr. Julio Denis, is drawn to a figure who calls himself “Rantés,” explaining that his presence on Earth is the result of his image being projected from light years away. Rantés speaks with a calm charm, and his earnest insistence on being from another world leads Denis to wonder if this could be a clever ruse, yet he cannot ignore the healing touch Rantés has shown to others. The doctor decides to let him stay, impressed by the way his gentleness quietly shifts the mood of the ward.

Denis is a man shaped by loneliness; a recent divorce has left him jaded, hungry for connection, and he finds in Rantés a rare opportunity to engage with someone who seems to see beyond the ordinary. The patient’s tale of a “projected hologram” and distant origins hints at a mind well-read and playful with ideas—perhaps a nod, Denis muses, to the works of Bioy Casares’ Morel’s Invention. As the days pass, Denis includes Rantés in outings beyond the hospital walls, including a visit to a touring Moscow State Circus, where the line between medicine and spectacle becomes deliciously blurred and the two men grow closer through shared curiosity.

Rantés possesses a psychokinetic gift that takes him across the city. He also spends long hours in a courtyard, motionless and facing southeast, insisting that these moments are how he receives transmissions from his planet. He hints, too, that he might be Denis’s own hallucination returned in human form, a suggestion that unsettles the doctor even as it fascinates him. Despite suspicions about his unauthorised departures and his refusal to take medication, Denis sees enough value in Rantés to push for his continuing role in the hospital. He persuades Dr. Prieto, the head of pathology, to bring Rantés on as a volunteer assistant, a move that wins the respect and loyalty of other patients and earns Denis a renewed sense of purpose.

The plot thickens with the arrival of Beatriz, an attractive young woman who catches Denis’s eye. Beatriz Dick—whom the doctor meets through Rantés’s circles—speaks of Rantés’s work among children in a slum and of his devotion to a gifted young musician whom he once cared for. She describes him as a “very good man” and implies a deeper, almost saintly nature. Denis asks Beatriz about her relationship with Rantés; she hints that she knows him as someone extraordinary, a figure deserving of faith. The tension between science, faith, and wonder builds as Denis finds himself drawn to Beatriz, and she becomes a catalyst for the emotional whirlpool surrounding the hospital’s eccentric new inhabitant.

Beatriz invites Denis and Rantés to an outdoor classical concert, a moment that crystallizes the film’s themes of art, community, and transcendence. As the orchestra plays Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Rantés is overtaken by the music and seizes the baton to conduct the famous Ode to Joy. The crowd roars with delight—the patients drift into the streets, their joy spilling into the town as they join the concert in a spontaneous, jubilant procession. The spectacle draws the attention of the authorities, but the conductor—the fearless maestro on the podium—persuades the police not to intervene. Rantés finishes the performance to a swell of applause and then is arrested, his brief flare of otherworldly magic checked by the march of institutional power.

Back at the hospital, the Director makes it clear that Denis’s priorities lie with safety and normalcy. Denis’s concern for Rantés—paired with a growing sense of doubt about the moral costs of keeping an extraordinary man under restraint—puts him at odds with a system that prizes order above all. The Director assigns strict monitoring and medication, and the mood in the hospital shifts as Rantés’s vitality wanes under the regimen. Denis’s faith in his patient falters, while his own feelings for Beatriz cycle between attraction and suspicion about her true nature.

A complicated personal turn follows: Denis and Beatriz share a night at his home, and Beatriz confides that she, too, is an alien projection who has learned to feel and love. This revelation unsettles Denis, who pushes her away in anger while also recognizing the ache of his own longing for connection. Beatriz leaves, wholly unsettled by the revelations and the fragility of human ties in a place where science, myth, and longing collide.

As Rantés’s condition deteriorates, he slips into a catatonic state. The Director authorizes electroshock treatment, conducted without Denis’s knowledge, in an attempt to shake loose the stubborn spell of his apparent condition. The procedure proves fatal, and Rantés dies of a heart attack without anesthesia. The other patients refuse to accept that he is truly gone, clinging to the hope that he has merely returned to his ship to wait for a signal to return. In the aftermath, Denis is left to contemplate the weight of what has happened: the choice to believe in something extraordinary, the responsibility of care, and the ache of human longing that Beatriz’s absence amplifies. He waits for Beatriz to return, his heart heavy with questions about love, faith, and what it means to reach beyond the ordinary into the unknown.

The film leaves a lingering impression of quiet, stubborn hope—the sense that even in a place built on boundaries, art, kindness, and human connection can bend the edges of reality, however briefly. It is a sober meditation on the tension between medical rationality and the impulse to believe in something larger, a tension that the characters navigate with patience, fear, tenderness, and a finally unresolved longing for what might lie beyond the horizon.