A Simmering Mexican Coming-of-Age Portrait – The Hollywood Reporter

The remarkable 2020 Mexican film, Identifying Features, directed by Fernanda Valadez and co-scripted with Astrid Rondero, is both a hypnotic mood piece and a shattering tragedy, a requiem for casualties of the country’s migrant crisis whose fates remain shrouded in mystery. Working in tandem as writer-directors on Sujo, Valadez and Rondero again mix grit and lyricism, this time to trace the coming of age of a boy growing up in a climate of lurking cartel violence. The new feature doesn’t match its predecessor’s distinctive spell or cumulative power, but its undertow of menace is expertly sustained, and its dread buffered by hope.

While most films about the drug wars in Mexico focus either on innocent victims or criminal perpetrators, Sujo explores the early life of one of the latter’s orphans, reflecting on the degree to which crime and violence become an inescapable legacy or a challenge of resistance.

A prologue explains the inspiration for the title character’s name, in a rodeo stallion that continues to break free. Sujo is just 4 (played at that age by Kevin Aguilar) when his father Josué (Juan Jesús Varela Hernández), a sicario for the cartel in their Tierra Caliente hometown of Michoacán, is killed as a traitor. Josué is known as “El 8,” a number that designates his position in the local criminal hierarchy. His death is announced via his appearance as a ghost to Sujo’s aunt, Nemesia (Yadira Pérez).

Cartel lore dictates that male heirs of assassinated members must also be killed, lest they grow up to avenge their fathers. But when a gunman comes looking for Sujo, his Aunt Rosalia (Karla Garrido) hides the boy until Nemesia can remove him to the relative safety of a remote mountain shack. He spends his childhood in isolation there, with only his aunts and Rosalia’s two young sons for company. The car and a set of keys left behind by Josué are Sujo’s only real link to his father.

As he moves into his teenage years, Sujo (Juan Jesús Varela, memorable as the missing boy in Identifying Features) and his cousins Jai (Alexis Varela) and Jeremy (Jairo Hernández) grow more rebellious. (The latter’s American name is a remnant of the family’s thwarted dream to relocate up north.) The boys ignore the warning to stay away from the town and soon drift into crime, as low-ranking drug mules. But when they get drawn into a turf war, death touches them again. Another ghost visits Nemesia, prompting her to put Sujo on a bus to Mexico City.

Rondero and Valadez divide their screenplay into four parts, each named for a different character and loosely representing the seasons of their protagonist’s young life. The storytelling tends to amble, to become occasionally choppy and not always clear, but it gains traction when Sujo starts reinventing himself, finding a job, a place to live and a valuable mentor in tough but kind schoolteacher Susan (Sandra Lorenzano). A refugee of Argentina’s dictatorship, she recognizes Sujo’s potential and helps him find a possible way around his lack of a basic education.

The filmmakers make deft use of Rondero’s score, which comes in with notes of hushed melancholy as Sujo leaves his birthplace and builds in intensity as his past catches up with him, causing him to act against his better instincts. That transition is also marked by the visual shift from the parched, scrubby landscapes of Tierra Caliente to the urban setting of the final stretch.

While the movie ends perhaps too abruptly, it closes with lingering questions of destiny and the odds for a young individual from Sujo’s background of effecting change and becoming a different person. It’s less bleak than Identifying Features, if also less haunting, but its atmosphere, texture and humanity confirm Rondero and Valadez as talents to watch.