A thriller done without the genre defaults, Lost in the Night (Perdidos en la Noche) is a film by Amat Escalante, a director who likes it bright and wide, slow and considered – more or less the opposite of the usual dark, claustrophobic, rapid and kneejerk.
Does it work? No, but it’s a near miss rather than a catastrophic fail, an ambitious film pushing the genre in an unusual direction, and at its centre a loner’s performance by Juan Daniel García Treviño, playing a Mexican teenager trying to find out what happened to his political activist mother three years earlier.
His investigation takes him to the home of the Aldama family, a strange brood – one’s a big entertainment star, her partner is a conceptual artist, her daughter is a sexy influencer. All are united by the same guiding spirit – they are intensely self-obsessed and useless at everything except being themselves – and it takes the intensely practical Emiliano (Treviño) no time at all to insert himself into their lives, as an oddjob man.
In a way the Aldamas are familiar. They’re like the family Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe is working for in The Big Sleep, and it’s the dangerous Aldamas that make this decidedly a thriller, when almost everything else says not.
Great performances here. First of all Treviño, who has a rags-to-riches back story that could become a film in its own right – son of a drug dealer, the school dropout was working as a welder before shooting to instant star status on his first film, 2019’s I’m No Longer Here. But also Fernando Bonilla as Rigo, the artist who’s out of ideas but can’t admit it. Bárbara Mori as Carmen the … what is she exactly? an actor, I think … has a career that’s on the skids. And her daughter Mónica, a proper femme fatale of the old school, played by Ester Expósito at full vamp, who has the sort of figure bomber pilots used to paint on fuselages.
Round the edges Escalante gives us sketches of modern Mexico. The weird religious cults, the law enforcement that’s a law unto itself, the massive disparity between the haves and have nots, the narcos.
And beneath everything a dialogue between the real (Emiliano) and the fake (the Aldamas), art and life, genre thriller and non-genre thriller, with a shocking and bloody finale (done in a glacial slo-mo) that could be called the revenge of the real.
Escalante used to be the assistant of Carlos Reygadas and while he must be getting sick of this being raised it almost always is because they share an eye for a stunning vista, they love a clean image, and they’re prepared to let character rather than plot drive their stories.
A bit more driving wouldn’t have gone amiss, if I’m being honest, much as I enjoyed pretty much all of it, particularly Treviño’s everyday-dude performance and his interactions with Expósito, which strike sparks. And the score, by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (who have been doing Stranger Things for the past few years) has a wafty, ambient feel in keeping with Escalante’s maverick intentions.
It’s those intentions, ultimately, that are called into question. Why make a thriller only to swerve the excitement? To see if it can be done, I suppose is the answer. Can it? Yes, but Escalante’s head is ruling his heart here. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but a thriller?
Lost in the Night – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
