Film Difficulty Ranking: 2
Why Watch Desierto?
- It is Mexico’s foreign language entry for the 89th Academy Awards
- Are you scared of Trump’s America!
- To see how barren the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are
- Pure action thriller and no dialogue (think of Gravity)
The Breakdown
Desirto opens with an expansive shot of the dimly lit desert. The sun slowly rises from behind some mountains in the distance revealing the scorched landscape in front of us. A small truck drives through this beautiful, barren wasteland. In the back of the truck is a handful of hopeful migrants looking for better lives in the U.S. We are not told anything about them and we can only judge them based on their appearance. For them, this horror movie is about to start as the truck grinds to a halt… their only means of getting through the desert has broken down!
There is probably only 20 lines of dialogue in this film, less if you remove character’s talking to themselves. Just like Gravity, another film scripted by Cuaron, Desierto is pure action from the start. However, luckily for Cuaron, no dialogue is needed to explain the characters because Trump’s America gives them authenticity, making them even more scary. The whisky drinking white man with the confederate flag is now a much more real and much more scary prospect. Combine that with the racist rhetoric used by Trump and you think, maybe this film could happen in real life!
In Desierto the yellows of the barren deserts and rocky outcrops dominate from the opening scene. The director excludes most signs of life from the film to emphasise the emptiness of the desert. The only animals that are living in this environment are rattlesnakes, a symbol of living death. The hostility of the environment makes us feel that we are not welcome there, that we are intruding on someone else’s land. And this feeling of intrusion is an important first stage of the horror genre. (e.g. Texas Chainsaw Massacre where hitch-hikers ‘intrude’ on Leatherface’s land).
Conclusion
Desierto is an interesting addition to the horror genre because it creates a horror out of an often debated political issue: illegal immigrants. This association, and the current zeitgeist in America, gives this film an extra layer which is lacking in the dialogue.
','' ); } ?>