Certainly a well made film, but just not for me. It's a dramatization of the real-life 'Lonely Hearts Killers' from America in the 1940's, a pair of predators who murdered a string of women looking for romance, and in one case, a child. While the film offers up some of the dark, twisted psychology of these people and they are rendered pretty well by Regina Orozco and Daniel Giménez Cacho, I couldn't help but wonder why this story was so important to tell, or if it offered up anything more profound than their sadism. It's dreary, dark stuff, and it wasn't very enjoyable to sit through.
I wasn't a fan of director Arturo Ripstein zeroing in on the obese woman's gluttony early on, showing her unable to stop herself from licking a knife, and in general emphasizing her unattractiveness, e.g. By giving her bad body odor. That just seemed to play on stereotypes, but perhaps the point of it was to show that between these two lowlifes, they pretty much had all of the seven deadly sins covered. We see pride (him), greed (him), lust (both), envy (her), gluttony (her), and wrath (her). The only one missing is sloth, unless you can distort the traditional definition into being lazy in basic empathy towards other people.
Maybe Ripstein was going for a dark and cynical portrayal of the human condition, complete with victims who are too easily duped and policemen without a lot of humanity. The only ray of light is a self-avowed atheist and anarchist who sees through the grifters and points out that the last time the Spanish were in Mexico to give aid to the continent, "they left a slew of dead Indians." The film needed more of these moments to balance it out a bit. By the time it came to the murders involving a small child (both as a witness and as a victim), despite those being true to the real-life killers, I just felt it was going for shock value. Regardless of the motivation, it was distasteful to me.
I wasn't a fan of director Arturo Ripstein zeroing in on the obese woman's gluttony early on, showing her unable to stop herself from licking a knife, and in general emphasizing her unattractiveness, e.g. By giving her bad body odor. That just seemed to play on stereotypes, but perhaps the point of it was to show that between these two lowlifes, they pretty much had all of the seven deadly sins covered. We see pride (him), greed (him), lust (both), envy (her), gluttony (her), and wrath (her). The only one missing is sloth, unless you can distort the traditional definition into being lazy in basic empathy towards other people.
Maybe Ripstein was going for a dark and cynical portrayal of the human condition, complete with victims who are too easily duped and policemen without a lot of humanity. The only ray of light is a self-avowed atheist and anarchist who sees through the grifters and points out that the last time the Spanish were in Mexico to give aid to the continent, "they left a slew of dead Indians." The film needed more of these moments to balance it out a bit. By the time it came to the murders involving a small child (both as a witness and as a victim), despite those being true to the real-life killers, I just felt it was going for shock value. Regardless of the motivation, it was distasteful to me.