It’s hard to say something new about a topic like drug cartels because they’ve been done to death by Hollywood and even a lot of Mexican cinema. But several movies of recent note have drawn the camera away from the violence and death inherent to the criminal organizations and brought it to the citizenry, with the long shadow of the narcos looming close at hand. Two years ago, Fernanda Valadez’s haunting and unsettling Identifying Features (2020) kept the tentacles of the cartels just in the periphery, hazy but ever-present, while telling the story of a woman trying to find her son who disappeared. This year, Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas does something similar in The Box, a slow-burn drama about a boy who starts to question the veracity of his father’s death.
Deceptively Quiet Character
One thing is certain – a young quiet boy named Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrette) receives a box of remains. But are they his fathers? On the way back home he sees a man near a bus stop who looks suspiciously like his father. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking but Hatzín implored the man, Mario (Hernán Mendoza), that recognizes him. Mario eventually takes Hatzín under his wing. Vigas turns a hopeful chance encounter, one that is ambiguous in its believability, into an odyssey of Mexico’s phantom web of corruption. Business, immigration, and drugs are all moving parts of a dangerous game in The Box, where violence exists just outside the frame and slowly creeps in.
Hatzín is immersively watchable if frustrating in his near-mute and blank-slate stoic personality. But Vigas instills a bubbling cunning inside the kid that is fitfully portrayed by Hatzín Navarrete. Navarette’s blank look belies the actions of his character. The only time he becomes reactive is when he cracks a joke with Mario once – a pivotal moment that starts to crack his façade as a “dumb kid” and reveals he’s smarter than he lets on. He witnesses a girl at the factory that Mario runs begin to become vocal about the low pay and poor working conditions. Vigas sets up their glances as a potential romantic angle in the story, but it gets extinguished quickly.
A Land With Buried Secrets
The bleakness of the film’s landscape, its vast open spaces that suggest both an inability to escape and an unforgiving emptiness that seems to go on forever, suggests it hides secrets – and many bodies. During one trip out into the expanse of the desert, Hatzín asks Mario what is in the container he’s burying. Mario responds “it’s best not to know.” The girl disappears one day and Hatzín wonders where she went.
We witness the ongoing conversations between workers and managers, the disparity between their labor and the money. We see a group of immigrant workers being told that the Chinese work harder and faster and will take their jobs if they don’t increase production. The movie accurately portrays the mechanisms of power and corruption as operating just out of sight, the violence is almost non-existent in the movie until a thundering scene at the very end. Instead, the hushed whispers of what might be going on, the rumors that circulate and then disappear into the wind, are all that ever result. Hatzín’s eternal crisis about the identity of his father, why he died if he even did, is constantly looming.
Conclusion
The Box uses an identity crisis to excavate the skeletons in Mexican capitalism’s closet. The specter of the United States seems just over the horizon, but it’s there and is referred to many times. This is a movie that forgoes the tired rehashing of the cartel and drug lords and the military’s butchering of the citizenry. The bodies are already buried in The Box, but what the movie asks is, who put them there and why?
The Box was released for streaming on MUBI on November 11, 2022 for all U.S. audiences.
Watch The Box
Does content like this matter to you?
Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.