Amat Escalante is the Mexican film-maker who created the brutal and politically engaged crime drama Heli in 2013, for which he won the best director award in Cannes, and in 2016 the deeply strange body horror parable The Untamed which was a prizewinner at Venice. Now, after a stint on the streaming TV drama Narcos: Mexico he has directed and co-written this contorted Lynchian melodrama about Mexico’s corruption, cynicism and indifference, and all the secrets and lies that bloat the country’s ruling classes.
Lost in the Night concerns what may be the corpse of a woman buried in the grounds of a super-rich family and in this respect it rather resembles Robe of Gems from Natalia López Gallardo, who like Escalante has worked with Carlos Reygadas. It’s a weird piece of work: episodic and violent and disparate (though it all hangs together) and flavoured with a mood of simmering erotic discontent, though without the fierce seriousness that was in his earlier films. Escalante may well have originally intended this as a streaming TV series, and it might have worked better that way.
Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) is a teenager whose activist mother has been “disappeared” by the cops for campaigning against a local mining company; he comes to believe that his mum’s body has been buried, or concealed in a water tank, in the grounds of a sleek modernist villa belonging to a wealthy TV star Carmen (Bárbara Mori), her Instagram-princess daughter Mónica (Ester Expósito) and her new partner, a fashionable conceptual artist Rigoberto (Fernando Bonilla), who amuses himself by goading a religious cult that lives nearby. Emiliano gets a job as their handyman and while investigating possible burial sites gets involved in the tortured sexual dysfunction of the household.
Emiliano’s relationship with his mother, her horrifying fate, the issue of the toxic and environmentally disastrous mine, and all those complicit in her murder and by that token in the destruction of Mexico’s environment and its communities … all these things are initially held out to us as important and the audience is effectively encouraged to invest in their significance. But by the end, Emiliano’s mum seems to be forgotten about and the film feels flimsy and even a little glib. Yet Escalante’s storytelling vigour and his way with an unsettling image keep this film’s voltage high.
• Lost in the Night is released on 24 November in UK cinemas.
