A naive young woman searches for her missing sister in Cadejo Blanco, a bloody coming-of-age thriller featuring a fabulous performance by Karen Martínez.
If you’re wondering what the title translates as, the cadejo blanco is a mythical white dog – a spirit animal of Central America folklore. And once you know that you might also start wondering what it has to do with Guatemalan gangs and the sentimental education of an innocent young woman.
You might still be asking that question as the film winds to a close and director/writer Justin Lerner is teasing us with a shot of a white dog roaming in the forests of Guatemala, where Sarita (Martínez) has finally become all grown up, in spectacular fashion.
But first a rewind, to a nightclub where pretty sisters Sarita and Bea (Karen Martínez’s actual sister, Pamela) are having a night out, talking about boys and being eyed by the local men. Conservative, stay-at-home Sarita is largely along as cover for Bea, who is the feistier of the two. With sober, sensible Sarita by her side, the sisters’ grandmother’s fears are assuaged and Bea can stay out later and see more of Andrés, who’s rumoured to be a member of a gang from a nearby town.
Bea never makes it home from the club and, when they’re alerted, the local police don’t seem that interested in finding her. Which propels timid Sarita into the only course of action she can see available to her: travel to the nearby town, find the gang Andrés belongs to and wheedle her way into it, to find out what happened to her sister and rescue her if possible.
Though none of it ever seems even remotely psychologically plausible, that is exactly what happens. Sarita joins the gang, first proving herself to be adept as the honey in an elaborate trap designed to kill a rival, before stepping up even more.
Lerner’s portrait of gangster life is a pungent but miserable one. The gang is full of life’s losers, young kids mostly, or horrible, spiritually malformed men and semi-detached women. It’s all very unglamorous. And his depictions of killings are grim too. Matter-of-fact bang bang bang and then the blood starts pooling on the floor. Death is part of business when you’re in a gang. If someone doesn’t pay you then a recourse to law is not on the table.
There are two central sequences where everything comes together and Sarita is asked to do the things that will prove her as a fully-fledged gang member, but also signal her departure from the normal morality of everyday life. Martínez handles these as well as Sarita does – with cool detachment, the logic of her quest (find the sister) propelling her on.
It’s a hellishly long-winded way of finding a missing sister, you might think at some point. Or put another way: this is a melodrama. Claims are made about psychological imperatives – doing the necessary – but in fact shocking events luridly framed are this movie’s driver.
You can’t believe a minute of it, in other words. For all the grim fabulousness of Lerner’s images, his building of mood, his shaping of a plausible gangster demi-monde, none of what Sarita gets up to really rings true.
Even so… even so… Martínez remains magnetically watchable, and Rudy Rodriguez is also good as Andrés, the punkass boyfriend of her sister who becomes the focus of Sarita’s investigation.
I saw it as a very, very loose remake of Get Carter, but instead of a case-hardened male as its protagonist, a slight, wide-eyed young woman, whose real skill is her adaptability. That is, in fact, the best thing about the whole thing – the way Sarita picks things up.
The white dog? Absolutely no idea.
Cadejo Blanco – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
