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I suspect that Heli, a Mexican drama playing tomorrow night at 9:30 PM and Monday at 8:30 PM, will be among the most divisive films at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. It contains some of the most graphic images of torture I’ve ever seen in a movie, and director Amat Escalante’s blunt, deadpan presentation somehow makes them even more repulsive. Like Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (a standout at CIFF two years ago) or Diego Quemada-Diez’s La Jaula de Oro (a standout at CIFF this year; it plays again on Tuesday at 1:15 PM), its subject is brutality in contemporary Mexico; and like those films, it generates a frightened, paranoid energy that makes violence seem all but inescapable. At the end of all three, major characters with whom we have come to identify have been stripped of their humanity, and the narrative has been interrupted by scenes of atrocity. Yet Heli may go further than either of the other films in the severity of its conclusion or the hideousness of its violence.
Seeing an opportunity to start a new life, Beto the recruit steals some packages of impounded cocaine and asks Estrela to hide them until they can skip town. In doing so, he puts a curse on her entire family, one that plays out long after the episode of murder and mutilation that makes up the film’s centerpiece. (Escalante keeps it deliberately ambiguous as to whether the torturers are military or drug-cartel men. As in Miss Bala, state corruption is made to seem so pervasive that their identity is a moot point.) Throughout, Escalante demonstrates astonishing command of mise-en-scene—not just in his intricate camera movements, but in the immersive realism he creates with his performers. (Intriguingly, Steven Spielberg presided over the Cannes festival jury that warded Escalante the best director prize this past May.) I could say the same thing of Reygadas in Battle in Heaven, Naranjo in Miss Bala, or Quemada-Diez in La Jaula de Oro. These films feel so authentic as to dispel (or at least qualify) charges of mere exploitation.
