Anticipation.
Made in 2021, it’s taken its good, sweet time to reach cinemas in the UK.
Enjoyment.
Karen Martínez’s confident performance more than cultivates interest in this powerful gang saga.
In Retrospect.
Strange that this one flew under the radar – it has a lot going for it.
Films about undercover cops tend to deal with the moral boundary that can and often will be crossed in order to retain the façade of criminality. Justin Lerner’s seamy, Guatemala-set crime drama, Cadejo Blanco, adopts a similar set-up in order to test how far the righteously pissed off Sarita (Karen Martínez) will go to locate her missing sister whose last known whereabouts was in the company of what she believes to be smalltime gangsters. The levels of security and tests of loyalty that these gangs insist upon, she discovers, are extreme to say the least, and once she’s snuck her way in, it’s not long before she’s thirst-trapping a local kingpin to assist with an
assassination attempt.
Sarita is wily and can spin a good yarn, but her survival instincts are not enough when it comes to the arduous and inflexible demands of gang life. Lerner’s slowburn saga deconstructs and admonishes a system where boredom begets anger and anger begets violence, and the hardnut lieutenants in these organisations go about their grisly business simply because, once you’re in, you’re in for life. It’s an unhurried story, one which drinks in the details of existential ennui suffered by kids who are supremely aware of the fact that they’ll probably have to take a bullet very soon. The question that remains is which direction will it come from.
