When the 47-year-old Argentine filmmaker Fabián Bielinsky died of a heart attack in June of last year, his loss was acutely felt—not just because of Bielinsky’s relative youth, but because he was among the very few new-wave Argentine directors committed to exploring ideas about life and society through genre storytelling. Bielinsky’s 2000 debut feature, Nine Queens, wrapped its brilliant con-man caper around the stirrings of what was to become the country’s millennial economic crisis. In Bielinsky’s second (and final) feature, The Aura, Ricardo Darí­n, who starred in Nine Queens, again plays a man with larceny on his mind, only instead of a professional grifter, he’s a mild-mannered, epileptic taxidermist who believes himself capable of executing the perfect crime—a feeling that surges in the ethereal moments of mental clarity that precede each of his seizures. Marooned deep in Patagonia on a weekend hunting trip, he stumbles upon others’ plans for a casino heist that seems too good to be true and which, like most such things, may well be. Whereas Nine Queens was a movie of clockwork precision and blindsiding reversals, The Aura is more internalized and digressive but no less striking, in large part thanks to Darí­n’s mesmerizing performance: His alien blue eyes and wolfish stare suggest a man who sees things in the world that elude ordinary men. A man who, like Bielinsky himself, seems to presage his own end.