‘Lost In The Night’: Cannes Review

Dir: Amat Escalante. Mexico, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark. 2023. 121mins.

The stink of death is ever present in Amat Escalante’s first feature since The Untamed in 2016. So is the spectre of corruption, in a rural Mexico where trying to fight the system is shown to always end badly for those without power, money and influence. Yet this is a very different film to Heli, the bleak arthouse drama that brought the filmmaker, a former assistant to Carlos Reygadas, to international attention after winning Best Director prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

Beneath its edgy surface this is basically a boy detective yarn

Although Lost In The Night parades certain familiar Escalante obsessions and contains scenes of striking beauty with something of a Mex-Western feel, it is, at its heart, a fairly conventional crime movie. It’s one that may well extend the director’s global audience while at the same time disappointing those resilient cineastes who signed up for the cold shower of Heli and the weird head trip of The Untamed. 

Who is lost in the night here? The deeper answer we draw from Escalante’s skewering of his country’s hypocritical self-flagellation in the face of violence and corruption is: Mexico, and the Mexicans. Literally, however, it is five activists from a small lakeside community in Mexico’s Guanajuato state who, in a prologue sandwiched between red-screen dividers, are seen protesting against the opening of a Canadian-owned mine before being brutally dealt with by local police.

Three years later, 20-ish Emiliano (Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino) still doesn’t know what happened to his mother, one of the five missing. A campaign to discover the truth led by his older sister is getting nowhere. So, when he gets a tip-off from a dying cop, Emiliano decides to take matters into his own hands, with the help of his teenage girlfriend Jazmin (Maria Fernanda Osio). Now, at last, we come back to the eccentric modernist lakeside house glimpsed in the film’s opening sequences, which is where the reheated cold trail appears to lead.

Emiliano decided he needs to infiltrate the place, and is taken on as a handyman by bear-like conceptual artist Rigo (Fernando Bonilla) and his partner, mid-life pop singer Carmen (Barbara Mori). Carmen’s daughter Ester (Monica Aldama), a pert, spoiled vlogger whose social media brand is to make videos in which she stages her own suicide, offers Emiliano a more brazen kind of sex appeal to the sweet, gauchely enamoured Jazmin – though deep down she’s a vulnerable, damaged soul.

If that sounds more like a description of, say, a few episodes from the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico (some of which Escalante directed in 2018 and 2021) than the sort of challenging film we’ve come to expect from the Mexican auteur – well, that’s part of the problem. There’s no reason Escalante shouldn’t branch out from bleak torture-arthouse or weird sci-fi erotica into what, beneath its edgy surface, is basically a detective yarn. And there is edge here for sure; for example, in the look of the film.

Art world satire gets a nod too, in the lurid installations created by Rigo, a jaded nihilist who mines his country and own family’s traumas for his art – ostensibly out of a desire to denounce injustice, though we suspect it’s primarily because shock sells. Again in an Escalante feature, sex is prominent, used variously to explore feelings or to suppress them.

But Lost in the Night’s attempt to turn an investigative drama into a parable of a Mexico adrift keeps floundering as the script lurches clunkily into the next chapter of Emiliano’s quest. It feels a little like what you’d get if a male Mexican Nancy Drew wandered into Polanski’s Chinatown. To be fair, there are those who would sign up for that in a heartbeat. With its confident visual style and tasty psycho-Western soundtrack by Stranger Things composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, there’s plenty enough here to attract a new audiences for Escalante as he moves on from his past works.