This article positions the protagonist Raúl Peralta in Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín 2008) towards the perpetrator end of a victim–perpetrator continuum. With reference to Michael Rothberg’s work on the role of implicated subjects (2013), it acknowledges the character’s status as class victim but foregrounds the repetitive acts of physical violence that mark him out as much more of a perpetrator under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The article also mobilises theories of allegory developed by Walter Benjamin (1928) and Ismael Xavier (2004) to posit that acquisitive violence, cultures of imitation and façades of unity in the film all resonate with wider aspects of society during the dictatorship. Citing Idelber Avelar (1999), it concludes with the observation that the film’s conceptual engagement with the themes of forgetting and erasure has relevance to this day, both within and beyond Chile, in a neoliberalism-influenced culture of novelty and oblivion.