Kritiken

Director Amat Escalante's domestic scenes have some feeling, despite wan non-pro actors. But he's clearly more interested in the violence, like the aforementioned torture scene. The torture is supposed to be unflinching and bold, but it's just deadening. The real unflinching truth is that an average newspaper reporter can do a more artful, compassionate job with a drug-war story than this movie does.

Escalante masters the vibe by being both meticulously realist — he uses digital sleights of hand, as we know from Los Bastardos, but you can't see them — and coolly observational. Heli is nothing if not a piece of controlled moviemaking.

The problem with Heli is that "hard to watch" is its sole characteristic. The rest of the movie isn't as graphically awful as its centerpiece torture sequence, but it does little more than flatly illustrate the obvious—namely, that the drug war is very bad news for ordinary, well-meaning Mexicans.

Escalante's emotional and political point through all this—namely, that Mexicans have in fact ceased to be witnesses who fight the injustices around them and turned into mindless spectators—isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of Heli has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.

Mexico has issues; sensationalism is probably not the best way to address them. It seems that the object of Escalante's unblinking nihilism is to illustrate a social reality. But in the end the film illustrates a less significant reality: the astounding self-importance of its director.

Almost on cue, the focus on a set of hapless innocents coincides with a slackening of formal rigor. It's almost as though Escalante fears that we'd miss the true meaning of the violence he displays if he went too medieval-Haneke on our asses.

At one point, a young boy whips out his cell phone to film a victim being tortured with fire and thinks out loud about the idea of uploading the footage to YouTube. It's that self-projected artifice—that daily routine to dilute the horrors of one's reality—which is what's really striking about Heli. Lots of drug films have shocking violence, but few observe the nameless people at the peripheries of the screen's frame and examine their ways of coping with their environment.

Heli may go further than [its Mexican contemporaries, Miss Bala and La Jaula de Oro] in the severity of its conclusion or the hideousness of its violence... 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.

...It pales in comparison to Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala in filmmaking terms but I suppose that it packs a crude punch (body count: 3 + 2 dogs). Heli did boast a couple of film-history firsts: a traumatized victim being offered a comforting breast to suck on by a female detective and an extended shot of an abducted police cadet strung up and getting his genitals doused in lighter fluid and set on fire. That sets a high bar for next year.

Take the motif of holding someone or something, be it a lover, baby or automatic rifle that is essential to the film's thematic intent. The aggressive placement of characters or vehicles facing each other is then juxtaposed with bodies tangled together in embrace. Escalante sees these conflicting images as indelibly tied to ongoing issues in Mexico pertaining to gender and identity, class and institutional corruption. Yet his characters simply want to be left alone.

Even though Escalante, in his third feature, refuses to spare us—that penis-on-fire moment seemingly goes on forever—he's striving for emotional meaning rather than just scoring points off our discomfort, and that makes all the difference. The despair and desperation of the movie's young protagonist (played by Armando Espitia) are believably human responses to horrific events, and Escalante keeps that in focus.

Escalante comes too close to titillation in his treatment of screen cruelty: despite all its psychological detail, the films sometimes does seem as if it was made first and foremost to shock and make the viewer go through an ordeal. I wouldn't recommend the movie to anyone sensitive to on-screen violence, but I cannot dismiss it as an empty exercise, either. It's a work of a highly talented filmmaker who happens to be drawn toward portraying malice.