Bad Company is a 1986 Argentine drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 written and directed by José Santiso. It stars Federico Luppi, Bárbara Mújica

Barbara Mujica

Barbara Mujica is an American novelist, short story writer and critic.Her latest novels are Sister Teresa , based on the life of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and Frida, based on the life of Frida Kahlo...

 and Miguel Ángel Solá

Miguel Ángel Solá

Miguel Ángel Solá is a prolific Argentine actor who has made over 60 film appearances in film and TV in Argentina since 1973....

.

The film is based on a play by Jacobo Langsner called Pater noster, which premiered in Uruguay

Uruguay

Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

 in 1977 and was first staged in Argentina in 1981 by Teatro Abierto. The film is a "thinly veiled allegory of life under a dictatorship" and treats the topic of the Dirty War

Dirty War

The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...

by denouncing "the complicity of large sectors of the civil population with the military." It earned praise as "the most profound, disturbing, uncompromising, and novel of all the films of the new democratic period to examine the years of terror."

Plot

An impoverished middle-class couple rents a room in an apartment from an artist, who refuses to let them cook food in the apartment and keeps them awake at night, living a life of debauchery. The artist charges them enough for the room to cover the entire rent of the apartment. After the husband is attacked by a lunatic who appears to be the artist's brother, the couple takes over the apartment and ties the artist to a chair with barbed wire. They force him to eat red meat (he had been living on bread and milk) and attempt to cure him of "unhealthy lifestyle"; finally, they dismember him. The audience's perspective has changed: initially sympathizing with the couple, it becomes clear that they are a metaphor of the Argentinian bourgeoisie which was complicit in the "systematic slaughter of some 30,000 students, trade unionists, schoolteachers, and others accused of being 'terrorists.'"