Amongst Men (2021) by Pablo Fendrik

Argentina | 2021 | 4 Episodes | Crime / Drama / Thriller

➡️ Where to Watch: AR · US · ES

Set in Buenos Aires in 1996, Amongst Men (Entre hombres) enters a world where organized crime, political influence and police corruption have become almost impossible to separate. The four-part Argentine miniseries begins with a decadent party involving sex and drugs, where a death is captured on VHS. Because a politically ambitious senator is among those compromised by the recording, retrieving the tape becomes the catalyst for escalating violence.

Directed by Pablo Fendrik and adapted from Germán Maggiori’s cult novel, the series deliberately avoids presenting conventional heroes. Gangsters, police officers and politically connected figures inhabit the same compromised ecosystem, creating a crime story where institutional authority offers little protection from criminality.

➡️ Series Insight: Amongst Men turns the hunt for an incriminating VHS tape into a brutal portrait of a society where organized crime and institutional power have effectively become partners.

Current Streaming: Argentina — MovistarTV / DIRECTV GO.

Amongst Men is particularly effective because of its concentrated four-episode structure. Instead of stretching its conspiracy across a conventional television season, the series pushes its characters rapidly through blackmail, murder, revenge and institutional corruption.

The ensemble is another major attraction. Nicolás Furtado, Gabriel Goity, Diego Cremonesi, Diego Velázquez and Claudio Rissi populate a criminal landscape in which nearly everyone operates according to some combination of survival, greed and violence. HBO itself positioned the series as a portrait of Argentina’s social divisions during the late 1990s.

➡️ Viewing Takeaway: Watch Amongst Men if you want a compact, uncompromising Argentine crime thriller where finding an innocent character may be harder than finding the criminals.

The historical setting is fundamental. HBO described 1996 Buenos Aires as a period when the frivolity enjoyed by those with power existed alongside increasing crime, poverty, marginalization and social vulnerability. Amongst Men converts that social divide into the architecture of its thriller.

Its VHS MacGuffin also makes the series distinctly rooted in its period. The recording is dangerous precisely because physical evidence cannot simply disappear into the digital cloud: possession of one cassette determines who holds leverage over politicians, criminals and corrupt police.

The production reinforced this atmosphere visually. Cinematographer Daniel Ortega described the photography as pursuing a raw cinematic aesthetic that could move between realism and stylization to represent characters immersed in drugs and extreme violence.

➡️ Why It Matters: Amongst Men uses crime genre mechanics to revisit the darker side of 1990s Argentina, transforming corruption, inequality and institutional collapse into visceral noir entertainment.

Amongst Men received one win and eight additional nominations, with recognition spanning writing, cinematography, editing, costume design, music, sound and the series itself.

Silver Condor Nominations

• Best Miniseries or Limited Series

• Best Writing in a Series — Adapted Screenplay — Germán Maggiori and Pablo Fendrik

• Best Costume Design in a Series — Patricia Conta

• Best Music in a Series — Cachorro López and Juan Blas Caballero

• Best Cinematography in a Series — Daniel Ortega

• Best Editing in a Series — Alejandro Parysow

Nominee — Award of the Argentinean Academy

Nominee — Best TV Series

The recognition across multiple technical disciplines is particularly appropriate for a production whose impact depends heavily on sound, cinematography, music and production atmosphere, rather than simply plot mechanics.

The series also achieved an important international milestone before its commercial release: HBO described Amongst Men as the first Latin American production presented in Berlinale Series, where it screened in 2021.

➡️ Awards Insight: Amongst Men’s recognition demonstrates that its brutality is supported by substantial filmmaking craft, with awards attention extending from writing and cinematography to editing, music and sound.

Many crime dramas construct tension around the boundary between law enforcement and criminals. Amongst Men largely destroys that boundary. Its police exist within the same corrupt ecosystem as gangsters and politically connected elites, shifting the dramatic question from who committed the crime toward who possesses enough power to survive its consequences.

That makes the series considerably more cynical than a conventional police procedural. The VHS does not represent evidence that will necessarily restore justice; it represents leverage, and whoever possesses it temporarily controls the balance between competing corrupt interests.

➡️ Standout Insight: Amongst Men removes justice from the traditional crime-thriller equation—the evidence everyone is chasing matters because it can redistribute power, not because it can reveal the truth.

Amongst Men belongs to a particularly powerful strand of Latin American crime storytelling in which criminality cannot be separated from the institutions supposedly responsible for stopping it. Police corruption, political influence, economic inequality and organized crime are therefore parts of the same narrative rather than independent problems.

That approach gives the series greater significance than its violent VHS chase initially suggests. The criminals may provide the spectacle, but institutional corruption is the larger antagonist.

➡️ Series Trend Insight: The darkest contemporary crime stories are increasingly interested not in criminals operating outside society, but in what happens when criminal behavior becomes embedded inside the institutions governing it.

➡️ Series Trend: Institutional Crime & Corruption Noir

The series is best suited to viewers comfortable with extreme violence, drugs, sexual material, morally compromised characters and relentlessly bleak storytelling. Its four episodes also make it attractive to audiences increasingly drawn toward limited series that can deliver the density of a crime saga without requiring a multi-season commitment.

➡️ Audience Insight: Amongst Men is designed for viewers who want crime television stripped of comforting moral boundaries—a short descent into a world where criminals, police and political power all feed the same system.

Amongst Men demonstrates how locally rooted crime stories can become internationally relevant without sacrificing their cultural identity. Rather than smoothing away its Argentine character for a global audience, the series leans heavily into 1996 Buenos Aires: its political corruption, police violence, social inequality, slang, music and distinctive criminal culture become part of the attraction.

Its international trajectory supports that strategy. Produced by HBO Latin America and Pol-ka Producciones, the four-part series became the first Latin American production selected for Berlinale Series, giving a specifically Argentine crime narrative visibility within a major international festival environment. That positioning demonstrates how television festivals can increasingly function as global discovery platforms for premium regional series.

The limited-series format is equally important. With only four episodes, Amongst Men delivers the density and world-building of a larger crime saga while demanding considerably less commitment from international audiences. Short-form premium television can therefore operate increasingly like extended cinema, particularly for crime, thriller and socially grounded genre storytelling.

There is also a broader lesson for streaming platforms. International audiences do not necessarily need regional productions to imitate American crime television. Series such as Amongst Men can become more distinctive precisely by combining universally recognizable genre mechanics—gangsters, corruption, blackmail and murder—with highly specific local histories and cultural environments.

➡️ Industry Insight: Amongst Men shows that the strongest international crime series do not need to become less local to travel globally; cultural specificity, cinematic production and compact limited-series storytelling can become their competitive advantage.

Amongst Men does not approach the Buenos Aires underworld as conventional social realism. Pablo Fendrik exaggerates it into a dirty, colorful and frequently grotesque pulp universe, where gangsters, corrupt police officers, politicians and businessmen appear to inhabit different levels of the same criminal hierarchy. Critics have described the series as operating between realism and comic-book stylization, with its brutality deliberately pushed toward excess.

The result is a series with an unusually aggressive identity. Its world feels simultaneously historical and heightened: unmistakably connected to Argentina in 1996, but transformed through saturated imagery, frantic violence, black humor and exaggerated personalities into something closer to crime mythology than documentary reconstruction.

➡️ Creative Insight: Amongst Men turns the corruption of 1990s Argentina into pulp noir, exaggerating reality until the entire social system begins to look criminal.

The narrative’s smartest device is remarkably simple: a VHS tape containing evidence powerful people desperately need to destroy. From that single object, the story expands across politicians, criminals, police officers and competing gangs, gradually connecting characters who initially appear to occupy separate narratives.

The four-episode format helps maintain momentum. Rather than following one conventional protagonist, the series shifts perspective between different criminals and allows apparently separate storylines to collide. The structure consequently reinforces its central idea: nobody operates independently because crime, politics and law enforcement are already interconnected.

➡️ Storytelling Insight: The VHS is more than a MacGuffin—it exposes the invisible network connecting street criminals to the people supposedly governing and policing society.

Fendrik rejects restrained realism in favor of movement, heightened performances, graphic violence and relentless energy. Micropsia described the result as a collision between Argentine crime cinema, pulp storytelling and comic-book stylization, while EscribiendoCine noted the frenetic rhythm and constant tension of his direction.

That choice prevents the series from becoming a conventional historical corruption drama. Fendrik is interested in the ugliness of the period, but he packages it through genre: shootouts, grotesque criminals, dark humor, drugs, sexual excess and increasingly outrageous confrontations.

➡️ Direction Insight: Fendrik does not simply reconstruct a corrupt era—he turns its violence and moral collapse into an aggressively entertaining pulp spectacle.

There is no conventional heroic center. Instead, Nicolás Furtado, Gabriel Goity, Diego Cremonesi, Diego Velázquez and Claudio Rissi form an ensemble of criminals and corrupt authority figures whose personalities compete to become more unpredictable, violent or morally compromised.

The heightened performances are intentional. Contemporary criticism noted that the characters frequently operate as exaggerated archetypes without completely crossing into parody, while the cast gives the criminal ecosystem its energy.

Furtado’s Mosca brings youthful volatility, while Goity’s Garmendia represents an especially disturbing version of institutional brutality. Rissi’s Tucumano further connects the series to the Argentine crime tradition familiar to viewers of El Marginal.

➡️ Performance Insight: Amongst Men does not ask its actors to humanize the criminal world so much as embody its extremes, turning masculinity itself into part of the spectacle.

The cinematography by Daniel Ortega helps distinguish Amongst Men from a conventional period crime drama. The Buenos Aires suburbs remain recognizable, but the visual treatment repeatedly pushes reality toward something more expressionistic and grotesque.

Academic analysis of the series has similarly identified stylization and the grotesque as central mechanisms for representing a decaying reality, while contemporary reviews described its combination of realism and audacious pop aesthetics.

This makes the series visually appropriate for its characters. Nothing feels completely stable because the world itself appears chemically altered by drugs, violence, paranoia and corruption.

➡️ Visual Insight: Amongst Men makes 1996 Buenos Aires look less like remembered history than a corrupted memory of it—recognizable, exaggerated and increasingly nightmarish.

Music is essential to the period identity. The soundtrack moves through cumbia, Argentine punk and popular sounds associated with the era, creating an immediate cultural environment rather than relying solely on costumes and production design. Micropsia specifically notes music ranging from cumbia to punk band 2 Minutos as part of the show’s stylistic formula.

The importance of its audio construction was also recognized institutionally. Leandro de Loredo won the 2022 Silver Condor for Best Sound in a Series, while composers Cachorro López and Juan Blas Caballero received a nomination for original music, according to the awards information provided.

➡️ Sound Insight: The soundtrack does more than establish the 1990s—it gives the criminal world its pulse, making chaos feel embedded in the popular culture surrounding the characters.

The 1996 setting is fundamental. Amongst Men depicts an environment where wealth and political privilege coexist with marginalization, criminality and institutional decay. The period is not simply retro decoration; it provides the conditions under which the story’s relationships between political influence, police corruption and organized crime become believable.

The series therefore functions as an exaggerated period portrait. Its criminals may be larger than life, but the structures surrounding them—political protection, police brutality, economic inequality and impunity—give their behavior a recognizable social foundation.

➡️ Historical Insight: Amongst Men uses the criminal underworld to portray a broader collapse of trust, where corruption no longer exists at society’s margins because it has entered the institutions at its center.

Amongst Men is overwhelmingly populated by men attempting to establish authority through violence, intimidation, sexual domination, money and criminal reputation. The title therefore becomes almost diagnostic: this is not merely a story containing violent men but a story examining an entire environment constructed around destructive forms of masculinity.

That approach is intentionally disturbing. Contemporary criticism highlighted the series’ exaggerated masculinity and identity-driven violence, while also noting that women repeatedly become victims within this male-controlled environment.

The series does not romanticize this world as traditional gangster mythology. Its men may occasionally appear charismatic or darkly funny, but their environment ultimately feels repulsive, self-destructive and incapable of producing anything except more violence.

➡️ Masculinity Insight: Amongst Men portrays toxic masculinity not as an individual personality flaw but as a complete social hierarchy in which violence determines status.

Perhaps the darkest element is that the police provide no meaningful alternative to the gangsters. Officers steal, torture, manipulate evidence and protect powerful interests, transforming law enforcement into another faction competing within the criminal ecosystem.

El País highlighted how everyday police corruption exists alongside corruption at a much larger institutional level. That distinction matters because the series connects petty abuse and elite political protection as different expressions of the same system.

Consequently, possessing evidence does not necessarily mean justice is possible. The VHS matters because it can be used, traded, suppressed or weaponized.

➡️ Corruption Insight: The most disturbing idea in Amongst Men is not that criminals have infiltrated the system—it is that separating the criminals from the system may no longer be possible.

Everyone wants the VHS, but almost nobody wants what it contains to become public. That distinction summarizes the series’ worldview.

Truth has value only because it gives its owner leverage.

Politicians want evidence suppressed. Police officers protect political interests. Criminals understand that compromising information can become currency. Violence becomes the mechanism through which competing groups continually renegotiate who possesses power.

This makes Amongst Men fundamentally cynical about institutions. The traditional crime-story promise—that discovering the truth might restore order—is deliberately removed.

➡️ Theme Insight: Amongst Men imagines a society where exposing the truth cannot automatically produce justice because the institutions capable of delivering justice are themselves compromised.

Amongst Men shares DNA with Argentine crime dramas such as El Marginal, but its four-episode concentration and heightened pulp aesthetic give it a distinct identity. Micropsia connected its style to Argentine crime cinema while also identifying influences reminiscent of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, filtered through a specifically Buenos Aires suburban culture.

That combination is its defining strength. It is simultaneously local and internationally recognizable: the political corruption, slang, music and social environment are distinctly Argentine, while the interconnected criminals, black humor and explosive violence operate within a familiar global pulp-crime language.

➡️ Difference Insight: Amongst Men takes the social corruption of Argentine noir and gives it the velocity of pulp entertainment—four episodes of criminals, cops and politicians destroying one another inside a system where nobody is innocent.

If the most compelling elements of Amongst Men are its violent criminal ecosystem, corrupt institutions, morally compromised men and distinctly Latin American perspective on crime, these recent films offer strong companion viewing.

Set around the dangerous gasoline-smuggling routes connecting Colombia and Venezuela, Pimpinero: Blood and Oil follows a family involved in the illegal fuel trade whose criminal livelihood becomes increasingly dangerous when the youngest brother is forced into working for a rival organization.

The connection to Amongst Men lies in its treatment of crime as an ecosystem rather than an isolated act. Smuggling, economic desperation, territorial power and violence become interconnected, while the border environment gives the film the same kind of regional specificity that makes 1990s Buenos Aires so important to Amongst Men.

➡️ Similarity Insight: Watch Pimpinero: Blood and Oil for another Latin American crime story where geography, inequality and organized criminal power are inseparable.

➡️ Where to Watch: US · CA · UK

The Delinquents begins with a deceptively straightforward crime: a Buenos Aires bank employee steals enough money to fund his retirement and asks a colleague to hide it while he serves the expected prison sentence. What follows deliberately moves away from conventional heist-film mechanics toward something stranger and more philosophical.

Its tone is radically different from Amongst Men, but the Argentine connection makes the comparison revealing. Both use crime to examine people attempting to escape or manipulate systems that structure their lives. Where Fendrik responds with brutality and pulp excess, Moreno transforms criminality into an existential question about money, work and freedom.

➡️ Similarity Insight: The Delinquents shows the opposite face of contemporary Argentine crime cinema—less violent and more contemplative, but equally interested in what happens when ordinary social rules stop making sense.

➡️ Where to Watch: US · UK

The Settlers moves away from urban crime into historical violence. Set in Chile at the beginning of the twentieth century, the film follows three horsemen hired by a wealthy landowner to mark the boundaries of his property, a mission that gradually exposes the brutality underpinning territorial expansion and the treatment of Indigenous people.

Its connection to Amongst Men is thematic rather than narrative. Both examine environments where violence is not occurring outside legitimate power but is being enabled by it. Wealth, institutional authority and brutality become mutually reinforcing forces.

➡️ Similarity Insight: Choose The Settlers if Amongst Men’s most disturbing idea was that institutional authority can legitimize violence rather than prevent it.

➡️ Where to Watch: US · CA · UK

Pedro Páramo is not a conventional crime film, but its vision of male power corrupting an entire community makes it an interesting thematic companion. Rodrigo Prieto’s adaptation follows Juan Preciado into Comala in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, gradually revealing a community shaped by one powerful man’s violence, desires and abuses.

Where Amongst Men distributes corruption across gangsters, police and politicians, Pedro Páramo concentrates it around a patriarch whose influence infects almost everyone around him. Both ultimately depict masculine power as something capable of corrupting an entire social environment.

➡️ Similarity Insight: Pedro Páramo expands Amongst Men’s destructive masculinity into historical myth, showing how one man’s unchecked power can leave consequences extending across generations.

➡️ Where to Watch: US · CA · UK · ES

Amongst Men works because it refuses to provide the moral safety net normally built into crime television. Pablo Fendrik creates a 1996 Buenos Aires where gangsters, police officers, politicians and wealthy power brokers do not occupy opposing sides of society; they operate within the same ecosystem of violence, favors and corruption.

The four-episode structure is one of its greatest strengths. There is little narrative space for distraction once the compromising VHS begins circulating. Every attempt to recover the tape produces another betrayal, confrontation or act of violence, giving the miniseries the concentrated momentum of an extended crime film rather than a conventional television season.

Its excess will not work equally well for everyone. Violence, drugs, sexual material, grotesque characters and aggressively masculine behavior are deliberately pushed toward pulp extremes. Yet that ugliness has a purpose. The Berlinale’s own description emphasized the series’ black humor, relentless brutality and examination of the moral and political abyss surrounding Buenos Aires corruption.

The craft also deserves recognition. Amongst Men earned eight Cóndor de Plata nominations, including Limited Series, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Costume Design, Original Music and Sound, ultimately winning for Leandro de Loredo’s sound design.

➡️ Final Verdict: 4.1/5 — A ferocious, stylish and deliberately unpleasant crime miniseries that transforms corruption, toxic masculinity and institutional collapse into four episodes of concentrated Argentine pulp noir.

The international festival positioning was particularly significant: Amongst Men was one of the first two Latin American productions selected for Berlinale Series when the program included Latin American content for the first time in 2021.

Viewers who enjoy dark Argentine crime dramas, gangster stories, corrupt-cop thrillers and morally compromised ensemble casts are the natural audience. Fans of El Marginal should find particularly familiar territory in its combination of brutal characters, institutional corruption and Argentine criminal culture.

It is also strongly recommended for viewers interested in short-form international television that feels closer to cinema than conventional episodic storytelling. Four episodes allow Fendrik to establish a substantial criminal world without diluting its intensity across a long season.

Amongst Men is unlikely to suit viewers uncomfortable with graphic violence, drugs, sexual material, degrading behavior, torture and deliberately grotesque characters. Its portrayal of masculinity is intentionally ugly, and the series offers very few characters who can function as conventional emotional anchors.

Viewers expecting a traditional police investigation may also find its worldview unusually nihilistic. The objective is not restoring justice but surviving a system in which virtually every institution has already been compromised.

➡️ Viewing Recommendation: Watch Amongst Men if you want a short, uncompromising crime saga with the energy of pulp cinema and the political darkness of institutional noir; its greatest strength is making corruption feel like an entire environment rather than the behavior of a few bad individuals.

Amongst Men begins with criminals chasing an incriminating VHS tape but gradually reveals something considerably darker. The tape can expose individual crimes, yet exposure means remarkably little when police, political influence and organized crime already intersect.

That is what elevates the miniseries beyond its deliberately outrageous violence. The gangsters are dangerous, but the deeper threat is a society in which the institutions capable of stopping them have become participants in the same economy of power.

Its international recognition reinforces the effectiveness of that approach. Berlinale positioned the series around its portrait of violence, power and moral collapse, while its Cóndor de Plata nominations recognized filmmaking disciplines ranging from adapted writing and cinematography to editing, music and sound.

➡️ Final Insight: Amongst Men suggests that corruption becomes most dangerous when it stops behaving like an exception and becomes the normal way power operates.