The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen)
A film by Luis Buñuel

Mexico, 1955

In Luis Buñuel’s darkly comic psychodrama, a reawakened childhood memory convinces rich, cultured Archibaldo that he is able to cause the death of others. But his murderous impulses are frustrated at every turn, driving him to find ever more inventive ways to fulfil his desires.

A key work of his Mexican period, Buñuel’s gloriously twisted film anticipates his later works with an ambiguous tale of bourgeois hysteria, transgression and erotic obsession. Full of pitch-black humour and Surrealist flourishes, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is an unjustly neglected gem from one of cinema’s greatest artists.

“Buñuel’s gleefully perverse mock melodrama… unfolds, in images akin to Freudian X-rays, the repressed desires that respectable society both embodies and conceals. […] the art of murder and the art of movies appear to be closely aligned”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

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ON BLU-RAY MAY 2026