Identifying Features: Dark, Lyrical Mexican Film Brings Beauty and Horror to Bear
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
Beautifully shot and terribly sad, with a wildly twitchy score ratcheting up the tension, the Mexican drama Identifying Features is a profound statement about maternal love, brutal inequality, and institutional corruption.
It is also one of several recent, notable Mexican films — Michel Franco’s searing New Order which played TIFF last year, and Gael García Bernal’s Chicuarotes from 2019 also come to mind — to sternly and unambiguously question the status quo in a country known as much for its horrors as its tourist-friendly pleasantries.
Age 48, illiterate, poor, and more or less alone, Magdalena (Mercedes Hernandez, magnificently expressive) sets off in search of her underage son who left their remote Guanajuato state in hopes of crossing the border with his friend Riga to work in Arizona with Riga’s uncle. The odds for the boys look terrible from the start, and before long Magdalena is on the road hoping to track down her missing boy.
Characters come and go, pivoting Magdalena is various directions but rarely offering much reason for optimism in her quest. Eventually, at a shelter, Magdalena meets Miguel (David Illescas), an itinerant young man who made it across to the U.S. only to be deported back to Mexico.
The pair form an uneasy bond. Along the way, characters help and hinder each other; acts of remarkable kindness are juxtaposed against terrible violence and, even more unsettling, an ambivalence toward horrible situations signalling a weary surrender to it all.
Early in the film, when Magdalena and Riga’s mother attempt to file a missing-person report with the local authorities, they’re handed a thick binder containing images of dead bodies, or parts of dead bodies, as casually as a book of mug shots. The pictures, collected and distributed by federal authorities, document unsolved deaths from just the previous two months. Four minutes in and already the stakes are impossibly high.
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Director Fernanda Valadez, making her feature debut, leverages the rural Mexican landscape both to ease and amp up the anxiety, as shots of drifting clouds, rolling hills, pink skies and parched earth contrast with and underscore the unrelentingly dark narrative. Valadez uses a fictional story to illustrate a depressingly real one.
The film’s mix of professional and non-professional actors drawn from the region where the film was shot adds to the gravitas, which is already considerable given the film’s storyline about those who disappear under mostly dire circumstances.
Cinematographer Claudia Becerril Bulos paints the screen in muted colours, but chaos is created by music director Clarice Jensen, who uses eerie, erratic strings to unnerve. A scene where a bewildered Miguel crosses back into Mexico is a case in point: his walk is scored like a horror film, which is doubtless how it feels to Miguel as he crosses a bridge alongside rows of cars shifting back and forth across a border he can no longer access, fortunes travelling concurrently.
Nothing in Identifying Features moves quickly, reinforcing the stultifying and often grave disparities that pin these characters in place despite their struggles carried out over great distances.
The film’s ending, which is almost unspeakably bleak and salted with a potentially supernatural bent, ensures Identifying Features is equal parts boundless art and sharp political statement, and one of the toughest watches you’ll experience.
Identifying Features. Directed by Fernanda Valadez. Written by Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero. Starring Mercedes Hernandez and David Illescas. Available available on demand at digital.tiff.net, Kino Marquee and virtual cinemas nationwide beginning January 22.