REVIEW - HELI

What fuels these people is not what they do but how they feel. They can't do much, see. Not out here, where Amat Escalante has abandoned them. Though not that he cares how they feel anyway. What the world will do to them and what they will do to each other will purge all feeling from their souls, until they are rendered mute, without family, without friends, without employment. But not without purpose - we, like all other species, like the cow in the mud pit or the dog in the derelict yard, are on this mean, hard, vicious planet to procreate. In the end, all that is left of us is not how we felt, but what we did, the people we left behind us to feel even worse than we did, all going well. His view of the world is deliberately pessimistic, and deliberately false, not because it erases the joy from life but because it erases the hope, which is something we can't help but feel. Watching these morbid creatures, permanently unfulfilled by the remnants of an existence once promised to them, flirt with the concept of hope is draining. In this false world Escalante has created, melodramatic in its content but resolutely stoical in its presentation, we do not engage, we do not attempt to understand and we do not learn. We observe with a passivity that places us alongside the inhabitants of this world, arid and stifling, a dust storm streaming past one's eyes with a guarantee only that it will never relent. These barren, wide open spaces are somehow sealed, the roads leading us out simply don't exist. You plainly don't know what a director can achieve via depictions of physical brutality until you've seen what Escalante achieves. Performances from a mostly young cast excellently match the tone of the screenplay.