El Infierno

El Infierno (2010) was released during Mexico's bicentennial celebrations and spits directly on them. It caused a serious argument at home. Benny is deported from the United States after twenty years and returns to his town. The place he remembers is gone. The cartel owns everything and everyone is implicated somehow. To survive he joins it, and he rises. The register is black comedy, but laughing is uncomfortable because the moment the joke lands the reality is still sitting there. Luis Estrada does not treat the drug war as an action genre. He treats it as the rotting of an ordinary town, with the police, the mayor's office and the church all in the cast. Damián Alcázar plays Benny as no kind of hero: frightened first, then adjusted, then good at it. It runs 148 minutes and the last half hour is genuinely brutal. Good for: Latin American cinema, black comedy, and viewers who want the drug war told without glamour. Less good for: executions are shown openly and often. Anyone looking for hope is in the wrong film. The title is not decoration.