The Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s “The Field” weaves a few of the best horrors of recent Mexican life into an unsettlingly cryptic thriller.
Hatzín (newcomer Hatzín Navarrete), a reticent teenager with melancholic eyes, takes a journey by bus to the north of Mexico to retrieve the stays of the daddy he by no means knew. When he arrives, he’s unceremoniously given a tin field. In it’s his dad, one among dozens of individuals present in a clandestine mass grave — a not unusual phenomenon on this a part of the nation, the place gang members typically eliminate their soiled enterprise.
When Hatzín sees a person on the road who intently resembles {a photograph} of his father, Hatzín promptly surrenders the field. There’s been a mistake. He tracks down the person, Mario (Hernán Mendoza), and insists he’s his son, following him till Mario accepts him into his life, or, quite, his enterprise.
Mario is a contractor of kinds who hires low cost laborers and transports them to close by factories, the place they’re inspired to make merchandise “nicer and quicker” than their Chinese language rivals.
Hatzín is fast; he instantly realizes that the employees are being scammed, and, good with numbers, he helps Mario with a few of his accounting. He intuits that Mario is hiding one thing — maybe a darkish previous that brought about him to desert Hatzín and his mom. The movie creeps in distressing and surprising instructions as Hatzín investigates the whereabouts of a lacking employee. Ultimately, the distorting results of the teenager’s personal absent-father trauma makes us query Mario’s intentions.
Stuffed with static widescreen photographs that bolster the thriller of the desert panorama, the movie is a depressing slow-burn with hints of neowestern malaise à la the Coen brothers. It’s wealthy with refined commentary in regards to the exploitation and disappearance of business staff, notably ladies, and an id disaster central to Mexican historical past, and it delivers these classes within the mode of a coming-of-age story—a really darkish one, certainly.
The Field
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Working time: 1 hour and half-hour. Watch on Mubi.