When Rigoberto Duplas, the worrying conceptual artist and antagonist of Amat Escalante’s new film, tells Emiliano, our steadfast lead, that the cheap glass in his modernist mansion has a tendency to “rattle,” it sounds like a dig. Luckily, it’s a tendency our hero doesn’t share. Played with furrowed seriousness by Juan Daniel García (a standout in the recent Robe of Gems), Emiliano is the most convincing part of Escalante’s muddled mystery: a film about a young man on a mission to avenge his mother who disappeared after protesting the sale of a local mine.
After breaking out in Un Certain Regard with Blood in 2005, Escalante’s ascension on the festival circuit has been nothing if not steady: awarded best director for Heli by Steven Spielberg’s jury in 2013, the director followed that success with a Silver Lion in Venice for The Untamed in 2016. That agreeably slimy film suggested a side-step from Escalante’s world of cartels and crooked cops––a story that was Lovecraftian by design, it delivered a potent mix of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possesion and the director’s own self-thought aesthetic. (I loved it.) Each movie seemed to build and expand on the ambition of the last, but then the movies dried up: his only credits since have been directing episodes of Narcos: Mexico for Netflix.
His first feature in seven years, Lost in the Night, feels less assured. In Emiliano’s story, the movie tries a great deal and ends up stretching itself thin. Touching on everything from class, corruption, and Mexico’s epidemic of “disappeared” people (over 100,000 are reportedly missing in the country) to social media and modern art, it gets lost in the knotted areas where those things collide––a messy kind of mood board on forms of exploitation. On one side, we have Emiliano’s mother and his community: her fury not simply sparked by the sale of the mine to foreign investors but by the jobs that went with it, namely that of a brother who was shot and killed attempting to cross the border in search of new sources of income. On the other side we see the work of Rigoberto: a wealthy artist obsessed with death, whose most famous work conceptualizes dead Mexican bodies. Out to avenge, and following a breadcrumb trail, Emilano ends up working as a handyman for the artist’s family: Rigoberto (Fernando Bonilla, a bit boorish and frankly miscast), his celebrity wife Carmen (Barbara Mori), and her influencer daughter Mónica (Ester Expósito of Elite fame). Embodying the shallowness and ineptitude of the police, Jero Medina is solid as the local cop.
Aesthetically, there’s not a huge amount to write home about. Escalante hasn’t lost his sense of style, but even the Duplas’ minimal lakeside household––with its Fassbinder-leaning wall mural and hovering fleshlight sculpture (title: “That Day The Producer Got Two Fingers In Me”)––provides only the briefest sardonic relief in early establishing shots. We are given an eerie, watery dream sequence and two startling falls, yet neither land with a great deal of narrative heft. Signposted by an opening Dostoyevski quote from The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, such nihilistic vibe is a touch too obvious, and the very best thing is what undercuts it: a central romance between Emiliano and his girlfriend, Jasmin (Mafer Osio, a lovely presence), the reassuring lifeboat in his storm. (Lost in the Night‘s best visual flourish is an alternating crotch-shot during some deceptively sweet fumbling-about.) In her, Escalante suggests the kind of saintly female savior we tend to associate with a Paul Schrader movie, but her character isn’t granted enough agency and is left to languish in the film’s margins.
Emiliano’s eyes are instead drawn towards Mónica (Ester Expósito of Elite fame), Rigoberto’s insta-beautiful daughter (Escalante introduces her with a podophilic flourish lifted straight out of Death Proof) and an influencer famous for her faked suicide videos: a macabre side-story not out of keeping with the misanthropic tone. Results are scattered. No shame in that, of course, but it’s the kind of incoherence that does more to exasperate than confound. A miss amongst the hits––he’ll be back.
Lost in the Night premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.