El Infierno (2010)

Luis Estrada has spent a career poking at the machinery of Mexican institutional life, and El Infierno finds him in grim form. Benjamin Garcia returns to his hometown after two decades in the United States, deported into an economy where the only growth industry is narcotics. The descent that follows plays as black comedy, though the comedy curdles quickly. Estrada stacks corpses with the patience of an accountant. The film was released to coincide with the bicentennial of Mexican independence, a scheduling decision that reads today as either patriotic duty or a very dry joke, and the MPAA handed it an NC-17 for violence and sex, which tells you the tone was never going to be gentle.

The film's anger is aimed at institutions, not identities. Don Jose runs his cartel on honesty, loyalty and absolute silence, then ends the picture as county governor, a promotion that requires no explanation for anyone who has followed Mexican politics. Benny's climb is a study in economic desperation: Guadalupe's line about getting used to anything except starving does more work than any speech could. She exists to motivate him and is killed to wound him, a piece of narrative furniture the film never interrogates. J.R.'s hidden homosexuality surfaces only as a device for shame and posthumous deception, useful for the plot's machinery and nothing else. The bloodshed is cyclical, the nephew inherits the rifle, and the wheel turns.

This is a satire of state complicity delivered through farce and carnage, its politics economic and systemic. It has no interest in the cultural markers that define the present decade's discourse, and no obligation to acquire them. Estrada's target is corruption as a national pastime, and he hits it with a sledgehammer wrapped in a joke. The result is a film that feels like a hangover and a history lesson at once, though it never stops to explain itself. Twenty years on, it remains a sharp, ugly, effective piece of work. The cycle continues. So does the audience's discomfort.