Films are, in a way, just collective fantasies... and, in some cases, nightmares. In Pablo Larrain's grim comedy Tony Manero, a man burgles and murders in the service of reproducing a stage adaptation of Saturday Night Fever and positioning himself as the titular disco hero, turning it all into his singular fantasy as he festers away in Pinochet's Chile. Everything must be just right: Even the concept of some original choreography sends him into a rage.

Raúl Peralta, played with blazing intensity by stage actor Alfredo Castro, feels nothing for either Pinochet's fascist state or for the resistance of which many of his clan of pathetic followers are a part. Excited more by glass floors lit from underneath and a disco ball made of shattered mirror than any woman, the 52-year-old Raúl beats a woman for her color TV, bludgeons a pawnbroker when he raises prices, and murders the elderly couple who run the local theater when they switch from Fever to Grease. In the film's ugliest moment, he defecates on a replica of Travolta's pristine white suit that his understudy has bought for a television appearance.

Absent of smile and dying his graying mop black every few days, Raúl is at once a theatrical clone of Pinochet and a reflection of his country's grody desperation. The way Pinochet fantasized about wielding power equivalent to the American president or his friend and supporter Margaret Thatcher, this grotesque lounge lizard fantasizes about wooing crowds with the simple shake of his hip and rhythmic gesticulations. In bed with his haggard lover, who has no hope in arousing his flaccid member, he turns to stone and casts her aside at the sheer mention that Tony and he are separate entities.

Filmed with Dardenne-like focus, Larrain's second feature, a surprise find at last year's New York Film Festival, is a comedy charred to crisp black, harking back to the surpassingly vile laughs of Man Bites Dog. Castro's over-the-hill sociopath goes to see Fever almost daily and recites the lines and actions as if they were Stations of the Cross. He is a creature of habit, wholly devoted to the realization of his muffled American dream. Reality is inconsequential: He cowers at the sight of the military or the secret police as they execute a member of the resistance. Upon finding the body, Raúl scours the corpse for money or anything he might use to build his cathedral to Manero.

At one point in the film, Raúl watches a scene from Fever where Travolta is told about the fantasy life of Christ and how one day you just see some guy and a cross. Later, as his troupe takes the stage for a rehearsal, he quotes the same scene without a hint of self-awareness. Tony isn't much of a Christ figure (though sometimes the ways his limbs hang give one pause), but he is a token figure of excess, especially in a wasteland like fascist Chile. Sporting his normal sour puss, Raúl tells a television producer that he is in "show business" and, seeing the road he took to get there, I couldn't help but think of Pinochet's infamous quote: "Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood."