Lost in the Night – first-look review

Usu­al­ly when you’re watch­ing a film by the Mex­i­can film­mak­er Amat Escalante, you’re con­stant­ly ask­ing the ques­tion: ​“I won­der when this char­ac­ter is going to die, and how hor­ri­bly?” His lat­est film Lost in the Night is a more sedate affair and sees him take a soft piv­ot towards a less dis­rep­utable, more genre-dri­ven type of work that ends up dialling back the trade­mark nau­se­at­ing vio­lence and sex­u­al humiliation. 

Yet there’s still a mea­sure of bru­tal­i­ty in this tale of a young Mex­i­can labour­er who goes under­cov­er in a bid to dis­cov­er the fate of his miss­ing activist moth­er. Yet, were there no title card at the front of the film, few would guess that it was prod­uct of a man who once filmed a scene of a young sol­der hav­ing his penis set on fire, then pre­sent­ed it in the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val (the film is 2013’s Heli by the way).

A local cop lies on his deathbed, using his final moments to con­fess his many crooked deeds. Emil­iano (Juan Daniel Gar­cía Tre­viño) uses the cov­er of his recent­ly paral­ysed pal to wan­der over shake­down the cop for the loca­tion of his moth­er, who was roughed up for her oppo­si­tion to the open­ing of a local mine. He points the dri­ven young lad to a lux­u­ry mod­ernist vil­la out on a lake, cur­rent­ly the abode of con­cep­tu­al shock artist Rigob­er­to Duplas (Fer­nan­do Bonil­la) and pouty social media Móni­ca Aldama (Ester Expósito).

Emil­iano invei­gles his way into their house as a handy­man. Ini­tial­ly he retains a low pro­file, but becomes obsessed with dis­cov­er­ing what’s inside a hid­den water tank, and won­der­ing whether ​“Rigo” and his fam are all part of a wider hush-up oper­a­tion. Rigo him­self is a mess of nerves, as he has a fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gious sect on his ass for a work he pro­duced which mocked its late leader, who was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced for child sex crimes.

There’s a clear self-crit­i­cal ele­ment to the film, as Escalante him­self could be seen as the artist who wal­lows around in a dress­ing gown, fear­ful of his abil­i­ty to shock and squar­ing up to his many detrac­tors. His even­tu­al earnest pitch to make an art­work around Emiliano’s search is what the film­mak­er him­self has done with this sto­ry about the deep, snaking roots of small-town cor­rup­tion and how it effects those on the low­er rungs. It’s a bid for respectabil­i­ty that back­fires – also appo­site when it comes to this film.

Móni­ca, too, con­tains shades of the imp­ish Escalante of yore, rack­ing up the heart emo­jis for her dis­taste­ful videos of faked sui­cides. The film is cer­tain­ly com­pelling, less for the plot rev­e­la­tions them­selves, and more for the way they come to light. Yet its con­ven­tion­al and con­trived final reel offers an unsat­is­fac­to­ry and unlike­ly dénoue­ment, in which Emil­iano is able to find a strange cathar­sis through the self-anni­hi­lat­ing foibles of his celebri­ty employ­ers. One can’t help but won­der if a lit­tle taste of the director’s old nas­ti­ness might have left a big­ger impres­sion with this one.