It's also about fantasy. As the credits roll, Estrella (Paola Lara) sits in a class while the teacher asks the kids to come up with the elements of a fairy tale; Then she asks the kids to write their own story using those elements. Most of those elements will factor in some way, or at least be name-checked, later.
The assignment's interrupted when a shootout erupts just outside the school. As they huddle beneath their desks, the teacher gives Estrella three pieces of chalk, and tells her each one of them is a wish.
The school closes indefinitely. When Estrella gets back home, she finds she's alone; Her mother's disappeared, presumably taken by the cartels.
When she uses one of her wishes to ask for her mother to come back, her ghost appears and starts haunting the poor girl.
When she uses one of her wishes to ask for her mother to come back, her ghost appears and starts haunting the poor girl.
Estrella eventually falls in with a gang of orphans headed by El Shine (Juan Ramon López), who live in a sort of rooftop pillow fort and make a living off of petty theft. An early scene where Shine lifts a gun and a phone from a cartel member is almost unbearably tense.
The gang gives Estrella a hard time until they decide to test her: If she goes into a cartel thug's house and shoots him (with the Gun Shine stole from him earlier!) they'll let allow her in.
It's all, as you might have gathered, pretty grim. The film's tone is not overtly oppressive, though, and not just because of the fantastical elements - the whole thing has a fantastical sheen even when as it deals with more realistic situations. The cartel only consists of four thugs, for example, and their evil is so cartoony that they come across more like fairy-tale ogres than any sort of actual real criminal enterprise; they torture and kill people because that's what they do, not in, I dunno, reprisal or for human trafficking or whatever. The stories the kids weave about them end up being closer to the truth than the news reports that mention them.
There are also long stretches where the film is content to just follow the kids goofing off. Some of these scenes are pretty funny (like when they run across an empty stage and reenact a reality TV talent show), some of them beautiful (as when one of the kids grabs an umbrella and dances under the rain). Some of it is a bit too precious, most of it feels pretty natural.
The fantastic elements help lift the mood as well. Most of the supernatural stuff is of the highly poetic variety - a line of blood sinuously runs through many scenes, trying to lead Estrella on and pointing at where things will inevitably lead. The resin dragon from someone's phone case flies sprightly away, and a graffiti tiger prowls the walls of the neighbourhood. There's also ghosts - lots of them, of the angry variety.
Bleak, cruel, but never hopeless, then, and possessed of a singular beauty both in its ideas and in its imagery. Especially as it builds towards one hell of an emotional, poetic punch towards the end.
All the actors are pretty good, which is a minor miracle given that most of them are children. Both Lara and Ramon López convey the steeliness, vulnerability, and underlying innocence of their characters ridiculously well. They're not well translated, though, as the subtitles at least in Shudder try to make their dialogue overtly gritty and thuggish compared to the original lines' more subdued realism.
The cinematography is beautiful (DP: Juan Jose Saravia). The colors are a bit desaturated, but most shots manage to find at least something beautiful in the squalor - be it an ornate window frame overlooking the city or a glorified puddle that's been taken over by carps. The camerawork alternates between handheld shots for more immediacy and more traditional steadicam work on the scenes that need it.
The shadow of Guillermo del Toro. especially The Devil's Backbone, looms heavily over this movie: many of the surrealistic touches are used in a very similar way, and the overall tone and development is similar. It's not a comparison that's kind to this movie - that would be unreasonable, as few movies match the tightness and ambition of Backbone's script. But writer/director Issa Lopez successfully keeps it distinct and separate from its inspiration, it never feels like a knock-off.
The influence may be clear but we get so few movies going for this sort of thing that, honestly, I'm happy to have one more. Especially when it's as bloody excellent as this.
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