...And Neither Are Their Cubs

Film: Tigers are not Afraid (Vuelven)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on Kid #1’s TV.

Every year, I spend about a week in St. Louis petsitting my daughter’s dog. While I generally have to work (and this year it happened during a finals week), it’s also a chance for me to catch up on movies. I showed up with more than a dozen discs, knowing that once finals week was over, I’d have two or three days in a strange city without a lot to do. Sure, there’s stuff to do in St. Louis, but the dog does need tending, and he can’t be alone for too long, so a couple of movies per day was on the docket. Of the many I brought with me, Tigers are not Afraid (or Vuelven) is one that I was most interested in.

Tigers are not Afraid takes place in Mexico in the heart of the war between drug cartels. Thousands of people have been killed or gone missing, leaving behind thousands of children forced to fend for themselves or become victims. In terms of the narrative, this is clearly a film that has connections to City of God, but there are also real connections to The Devil’s Backbone, not merely because of it being in Spanish. This is a film that is very much a dark fairy tale, a grittier version of what Guillermo del Toro does best, creating a connection to Pan’s Labyrinth as well.

Estrella (Paola Lara) lives in a Mexican city torn apart by drug cartels. One day in school, while working on a fairy tale assignment, the school is caught in a crossfire. During the fire fight, her teacher gives her three pieces of chalk, telling her that they will act as wishes for her and keep her safe. When Estrella goes home, she discovers her mother missing. She uses the first wish to bring her mother back, which happens as a vision, with her mother imploring “Bring him to us.”

At the same time, street orphan Shine (Juan Ramón López) steals the gun and phone from a drunken cartel member named Caco (Ianis Guerrero). Shine doesn’t know, but the phone contains a video of Caco’s boss Chino (Tenoch Huerta) killing a captive woman. As it happens, gang leader Chino is also local politician Servando Esparza. The two stories come together when Estrella finds Shine stealing from her house. With her mother gone, Estrella has nowhere to go, so she follows him back to his gang, made up of him and three other young boys, Pop (Rodrigo Cortés), Tucsi (Hanssel Casillas), and Morrito (Nery Arredondo).

The five kids attempt to survive, knowing that Chino and his gang are looking for the phone. The boys demand that she kill Caco to be able to stay with them. She uses the second wish to wish that she didn’t have to kill him, and when she enters his house, she finds him already dead, which only intensifies the search for her by Chino and the cartel. She realizes that the wishes are essentially a monkey’s paw, but the visions of her mother and other dead people demanding “Bring him to us” will not stop. Where this is going is clear, and who “he” is becomes equally clear, but Tigers are not Afraid is not about the destination, but the journey that gets us there.

One of the predominant images of the film are trails of blood that follow Estrella around. When she is to be confronted by spirits, or when something bad is going to happen, a trail of blood appears, leading inevitably to something terrible.

This is a hard film not to find impressive in a lot of respects, and I am genuinely surprised that Guillermo del Toro didn’t have a hand in the production. Drug cartels are not his normal bag, but the rest of this feels very much like a film that he had a hand in. I say that only with respect, as someone who has long been a del Toro apologist. This feels like the drug cartel child of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone.

Is there a downside to this? If there is, it’s only that the scares are not anything that comes from the supernatural aspects of the film. There is perhaps a sense that we should be scared for Estrella when the first visions of the dead come to her, but it simply doesn’t happen in that way. This might be because the direction the film goes in is not a surprise; as previously mentioned, the destination is not in question with this, but the journey that gets us there is what is interesting. More importantly, though, the supernatural loses its ability to terrify us when reality is so much worse.

It is perhaps the simplicity of the story that is its biggest issue, but it’s hardly an issue here. I very much look forward to tracking down the future efforts of writer/director Issa López, because this is a hell of a way to find out about her.

Why to watch Tigers are not Afraid: It’s almost a pure homage to Guillermo del Toro.
Why not to watch: It could honestly go another 10 minutes.