Tigers Are Not Afraid: The Cartel Fairy Tale

Tigers Are Not Afraid opens with a girl writing a fairy tale in an exercise book while her teacher talks about princes, and then it puts a number on the screen. The number is the count of people killed and disappeared in Mexico’s drug war. Then gunfire starts outside the classroom and everybody goes to the floor, and the teacher — still on the floor, still calm — hands the girl three pieces of chalk and tells her she has three wishes.

That is the first ninety seconds, and it is the entire film. Issa López’s 2017 picture, known in Spanish as Vuelven, spends its running time refusing to let go of either half of that opening: the fairy tale and the statistic, in the same frame, arguing.

It reached most people through advocacy. Guillermo del Toro saw it and would not shut up about it, and Stephen King said so too, and between them they pushed a small Mexican film with no stars onto the shelves of people who would otherwise never have found it. Del Toro’s enthusiasm was a mixture of generosity and self-interest, since the film is unmistakably in conversation with his own work, and he knew it before anyone.

The lost boys of a real city

Paola Lara plays Estrella. Her mother goes out and does not come back — the film gives you the ordinary domestic detail of the waiting, the phone, the flat getting darker — and the child is left in a city where the disappearance of a woman generates no institutional response whatsoever.

She attaches herself to a gang of orphaned boys living on rooftops and in the shells of abandoned houses, led by Shine, played by Juan Ramón López. Shine is perhaps twelve and runs his crew with the wariness of a much older man who has been told exactly once that adults do not arrive. He does not want a girl in the gang. He has stolen a phone and a gun from the local cartel outfit, which is a decision the film will spend eighty minutes collecting on.

López cast children who could carry this, and their performances are the reason the film survives its own ambition. Juan Ramón López’s Shine in particular is a startling piece of work: hostile, proprietary, brave in a way that is plainly a substitute for having anything else, and the film is careful to keep him a child. He is frightened. He shows off. He is cruel in the small, cheap ways of a boy with no supervision. The horror is that this person is running a household.

The chalk, the tiger, the blood

The craft is where Tigers earns its place, because López made it for a fraction of what its images suggest, and she got there by choosing her effects with an almost brutal economy.

Three things move that shouldn’t. Chalk drawings crawl on walls. A trail of blood behaves like a small animal — following Estrella down a corridor, waiting at doorways, insisting. And a tiger, drawn in graffiti on a wall, is somewhere in the film’s peripheral vision from the first act onwards.

Every one of these is cheap. A blood trail on a floor is a compositing job of modest difficulty. Animated chalk is a few frames of hand-drawn work over a plate. What makes them land is that López puts them in an otherwise flatly realistic film — hand-held, natural light, real streets, the grit of an actual city — and never once flags them as magic. There’s no shimmer, no chime, no reaction shot of a child gasping in wonder. The blood follows Estrella the way a stray dog would. The film’s register does not change to accommodate the supernatural, so the supernatural has to fit into a register built for documentary, and it does, and that’s what makes it frightening.

The other technical choice is the geography. These children live above the city, on roofs and in ruins, and López shoots their world as a horizontal plane at the wrong height — a whole country of derelict rooftops with the real city rumbling underneath. It’s a children’s kingdom that exists because the adult one has abdicated, and the camera treats it as ordinary, because to them it is.

The sound design works the same abdication. Adults in this film are mostly audible rather than visible — a television somewhere, a car, a voice on a phone, gunfire two streets over — and López keeps them at that distance for most of the running time. The city is a noise the children live underneath. When an adult finally arrives in the frame with weight and intent, the effect is close to a monster entering, because the film has trained you for an hour to experience grown men as off-screen sound.

Then there’s the ghosts, and here López makes the choice the film lives or dies by. The dead in this film want something. They follow the children with a purpose, and the purpose is that they have been disappeared and would like to be found. Ghost-as-testimony is an old idea. Attaching it to a specific, ongoing, uncounted national atrocity gives it a charge that no haunted house can generate.

The real ancestor

Everyone says Pan’s Labyrinth, and the debt is real and acknowledged — a child under fascism building a fantasy that turns out to have teeth. Del Toro’s whole project is the argument that the monster is the safe thing in the room and the men in uniform are the danger, and López is running that argument in a country where the men are cartel rather than Falangist. The closer del Toro comparison is The Devil’s Backbone, where a dead child haunts a school full of living ones and the ghost is the least of anybody’s problems.

The deeper ancestor is Buñuel. Los Olvidados, made in Mexico City in 1950, is the founding text for this exact material: street children, no sentimentality, no redemption arc, a camera that watches poverty produce cruelty and declines to look away or make it beautiful. Buñuel got attacked for it in Mexico at the time for insulting the nation. Tigers Are Not Afraid is Los Olvidados with the fairy tale that Buñuel would never have permitted, and the whole tension of López’s film is the argument between those two impulses — the Buñuel eye that knows these children are doomed and the storyteller’s hand offering them three wishes anyway.

For the other end of Mexican genre film — the domestic horror that made the international festival circuit take the country’s horror seriously — see We Are What We Are, which arrived seven years earlier and did the family what López does to the street.

The case against

The wishes are a problem. Fairy-tale logic asks that magic have rules, and the rules here are loose enough that the ghosts’ behaviour reads as authorial convenience in at least two places. When a wish costs something, it costs whatever the scene requires. That’s a real weakness in a film that is otherwise ferociously disciplined.

The second objection is tonal. López is asking an audience to hold documentary brutality and animated chalk in the same hand, and for some viewers the join shows — the whimsy undercuts the reportage, or the reportage makes the whimsy feel like an evasion. I think she gets away with it because the children themselves have to do the same thing, and holding two irreconcilable things at once is a fair description of being a child in a war.

The last act also compresses. There’s a plot about a phone and a video and a man who wants them back, and it resolves with an efficiency that the preceding hour didn’t prepare you for.

What is not arguable is that López found a form for something that had no form. Mexico’s disappeared are a bureaucratic category, and bureaucratic categories are unfilmable. She made them a ghost story, and gave the ghost story to children, and put the count on the screen at the start so you could not pretend it was only a ghost story.

It streams in most territories under both titles and is worth seeking under Vuelven if the English one fails you. Watch it, then watch Los Olvidados, and see what seventy years changed and what it didn’t.

Spoilers below

The wishes work, which is the cruelty.

Estrella wishes her mother back. Her mother comes back. What arrives is a presence — wet, insistent, following, wanting — and the film understands that a returned dead mother is a horror rather than a comfort. The wish is granted exactly as asked and the asking was the mistake. That’s the oldest rule in the fairy-tale book, and López plays it without a wink.

The dead accumulate. They want the same thing the missing always want, which is to be acknowledged, and Estrella spends the film being followed by a queue of people nobody else can see and nobody in authority will count.

Shine’s theft is the plot’s engine and his death is its point. The film has spent its length making you believe this boy might get out — he is competent, he is quick, he has kept these children alive — and then it kills him, because competence was never what the situation turned on. His gang thins out around him. The rooftop kingdom empties.

The confrontation with the cartel man goes the way the film has been promising, and Estrella survives it, and the survival is not a victory in any register the picture will let you enjoy. The last wish gets spent, and what it buys is smaller than what was lost.

The final image is the tiger. Estrella walks, and the animal is there, padding along behind her — the drawing off the wall, made real, or made real enough. López leaves it exactly ambiguous, and the ambiguity carries the title. The tiger is a companion for a child who has run out of people, and the last thing the film gives her is the one thing it has been telling you the whole time she needs, which is somebody walking beside her who is not afraid.