Sujo review - cartels through another lens

It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.

In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience violence the way many who inhabit violent places actually experience it – mostly embedded in the fabric of life, only occasionally directly. 

It’s not a choice many – or perhaps any – male filmmakers might make. But Sujo comes from the female writing and directing duo of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, and for them violence arrives in the manner that movie people often say it’s best: implied and oblique. (The people who say that often don’t bother to stick to the rule.) So the nasty stuff is seen only a couple of times here, and it carries an appropriate jolt.

A barrel of liquified fat, which we realise was formerly a pivotal character. Someone recently deprived of a finger. Other farewells to life and limb are heard through the grapevine – or in this case the mists and cacti of an unusually wintry Tierra Caliente in southern Mexico. 

The rather slow and sinuous story is of a boy called Sujo – aged about five – who is taken in by his aunt after his gunman father ends up in the aforementioned barrel. Sujo’s dad had been recruited by the local bad men as a kid and risen in their ranks to become “The Eighth”, or the eighth most ruthless in these parts. It was a number tattooed large on his chest, but Sujo has a number on his back as his heir, and the fiercely protective aunt (Yadira Pérez Esteban) has to keep him under wraps in her isolated shack, fed on bread and warm milk.

This isn’t a movie where women travel in blind fellowship with crime. Sujo’s aunt is called Nemesia, which means “Vengeance”, but her vengeance comes in the form of unremitting care.

The bandits in the nearby town have cars and nice homes, and it seems only a matter of time before Sujo, eventually forgiven for his father’s sicario sins, will drift towards the bright lights and gangland’s lower ranks.

So this proves, as the teen Sujo (Juan Jesús Varela) and his two childhood mates get their feet on the drug-dropoff ladder, only to be caught in a turf war that goes ugly for one of them. In a final, surprisingly placid section, Sujo flees to Mexico City and tries to get an education at the hands of another hardened mother figure, a college lecturer from Argentina played by Sandra Lorenzano.

Although the occluded deserts and townscapes are well-framed and lit, and there are small moments of lyricism, the film’s echoing feel comes with a ruminative pace, along with curt dialogue and often plain performances. There’s not the splashiness of Jacques Audiard’s recent Emilia Pérez, another Mexican cartel lid-lifter. But Sujo’s watchfulness cuts against our expected pessimistic thrills – namely, give me child until he is seven and I will give you a narco. Sujo acquires the gang tag “40” inscribed on his chest, yet the picture hums a low and oddly inspiring redemption song.

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