Tigers Are Not Afraid

Tigers Are Not Afraid (IMDB says 2017, but it got its US release just this month in 2019)

Dir. and written by Issa López

Starring Paola Lara, Juan Ramón López, Nery Arredondo

There are a few things which seem to be irresistible to critics. Simple elements which warp normally sensible people into raving delusional supporters of mediocre garbage. One is seeing films at festivals, before anybody else, with an excited audience that feels very special just to have this opportunity. Another is making movies about adult topics, but set from children’s perspective, so we can juxtapose the innocence of youth against the grimness of the adult world. Still another is magical realism, which makes even the shallowest narratives seem mysterious and symbolic and potentially important. And finally, topical, ripped-from-the-headlines settings which empathetically document real-life woes and consequently feel very capital “I” Important.

TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID has all four, which is the only explanation I can think of for the rapturous reception it received from all quarters, including people who should have known better. I mean, people have been comparing this to Del Toro, LOS OLVIDASOS, fuckin’100 Years Of Solitude. It’s a full-blown psychosis, and it seems like I’m the only one it hasn’t touched. It brings me no joy whatsoever to report this, because who likes trashing a little indie movie, especially a foreign one made by people who I have every reason to believe are perfectly sincere about using their movie to address an ugly real-world truth which is too rarely featured in cinema, or at least too rarely from this perspective? I don’t wanna be that guy. But integrity and the fact that I am obligated to review every movie I watch during October compels me to confess to you that either A) I have finally fucking lost it, and watching so many awful Z-grade horror movies has warped my brain so badly that I can’t tell good from bad anymore or B) this movie is painfully dull, borderline insulting hokum which in no way merits a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score or even its somewhat more moderate 75% on Metacritic.

It does, I'll happily concede, have a worthwhile scenario: it concerns the orphaned children left behind after their parents are murdered in the endless, poisonous drug war which has consumed huge portions of Mexico and Latin America more generally. The city is unnamed (it was shot in Mexico City), but it barely matters because the movie mostly takes place in spaces which have essentially been abandoned by the population at large (who barely appear) and are now home to a Lord Of The Flies underworld of gangs made up of abandoned, homeless children. And I do mean children; we see a few teenagers, but mostly these are elementary-school-aged kids, barely more than babies in some cases. Of course, “elementary school” is not a great indicator in this case, since street life offers a very different kind of education.

We enter this world through the eyes of Estrella (Paola Lara, in her first feature film), a young girl on what she will discover is her last day in school. It's not a good one. A shower of gunshots nearby forces the kids to cower on the floor, and a well-meaning teacher tries to give her comfort by placing three wish-granting sticks of chalk in her hand. And the day gets worse – a supernatural trail of blood follows her, and when she gets home, she finds her mother has vanished. When she wishes on the magic chalk for her to return, she is rewarded by a visit from her mother's ghostly, zombified body, wrapped in a plastic body bag a la SICARIO. With no one to care for her, Estrella is forced out onto the street, where she meets a gang of orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramón López, also in his first film role), a tormented, angsty Jeremy Sisto type, in, uh, a 10-year old's body. He's always staring off into the middle distance moodily, and is too cynical and disaffected to feel anything but irritation at taking on a newcomer. Still, she tags along with him and his gang, and gradually comes to be involved in their conflict with a very adult gang of killers who are (semi-spoiler, if you've never seen a movie before) seeking a stolen cell phone with incriminating information about their leader, who happens to moonlight as a smarmy political candidate. This arranges the plot into something like a crime thriller, albeit one that crops up only where it's absolutely narratively necessary; the movie is much more interested to following the kids as they play, fight, and try to entertain themselves and survive without any resources.

There's nothing overwhelmingly original here, but that's a workable enough premise, at least offering a semi-exotic mix of topical misery porn and light fantasy elements. The problem is that the pleasures here are almost exclusively conceptual. It's a movie that very much resembles a movie with something to say, without ever actually getting around to saying anything. It frankly feels calculating and manipulative, preying on our natural sympathy for suffering children and using that to paper over how shallow the characterization is, let alone the transparently functional narrative. It's a film that has sympathy, but no real ideas, and certainly no real examination of its premise. The characters are paper-thin, the thriller elements are threadbare, and the fantasy –let alone any phony claim of “horror”—irrelevant.

The lack of effective genre elements is damning, but since the movie spends most of its time as a drama, it’s really the superficial characterization that dooms it. No offense to the child actors, who are doing the best they can with what they have, but their dialogue oscillates between gratingly precocious and insufferably cutesy, with no internal logic to guide it.* Shine's silly tough guy demeanor could be made interesting – perhaps it is his “tiger suit” that he puts on to feel brave, constructed from the stilted pop culture it so closely mimics. But the movie makes nothing of it; by its estimation this is perfectly natural behavior which needs no further examination (for the record, Ramón López does as well with the role as any human could have). Likewise, it stubbornly refuses to engage with Estrella's emotional state beyond the most superficial terms. Sure, she's sad, she's scared, she's angry at the people who did this. But surely there are subtler, more interesting feelings here too, especially for a child, who doesn't have the experience to know what to do with them. What does the sudden, disorienting plunge from unquestioned security to complete vulnerability do to her? How does her outsider status in the group affect the way she sees herself and her role? The movie doesn't ask. In theory, the magical realism ought to be a perfect way for us to symbolically get inside her unexpressed inner world, but the only use the movie ever finds for its fantasy elements is to throw something vaguely spooky at Estrella. Little flying dragons, the ominous trail of blood, a handful of moments where she sees ghosts. You know, to communicate that most intangible and ephemeral of human emotions, “being anxious that gangster want to kill you.” How ever would we depict that without tiny computer animated dragons?

It is, in a word, shallow. It poses that children deal with this kind of unbearable trauma by escaping into fantasy. And then, that’s it. That’s the film’s only card, and once it’s played, there’s nothing else to it but a rote, half-hearted thriller plot which sort of happens in the background, though not as far in the background as the supposed horror elements, which make up maybe five minutes of the total runtime. In fact, despite the fact that there’s a zombie on the goddam poster, this very much feels to me like one of those movies that the director wanted to make, but couldn’t get funded until she pitched it as a genre flick, so she obligingly crammed a little bit of second-unit zombie crap in there and spliced it into the story every so often to paper over the fact that it is in absolutely no way whatsoever a horror film.

This puts the film in an unfortunate contradictory position; it badly wants to be a searing indictment of the intolerable current socio-political situation, complete with some ham-fisted jabs at cynical politicians and corrupt cops. And yet, it needs the schlocky genre stuff to be a story worth telling, or at least, a story which many people would seek out. But throwing a frankly laughable crime-thriller plot into this kind of realist miserabilism is a bad fit, making the drama seem phony and making the genre stuff seem ridiculous. How the fuck are we supposed to be scared of a gang of killers which consists, apparently, of only four guys, all of whom are consistently unable to wrangle a cell phone away from five scared 3rd-graders? And for that matter, the earnest journalistic urge to call attention to drug war orphans and their grim and separate underworld can't help but force us to think a little bit about how this would work, at which point huge plot holes start to open up. Shine won't give up the stolen cell phone, even though holding onto it puts everyone in desperate mortal peril, because it has the only picture of his mom on it. Awww. But dawg, you realize that shit is in the cloud, right? You can have a photobucket account in 20 seconds for free. He clearly understands the phone and how it works, using it like a pro when he needs to. The fact that this obvious solution never comes up is a matter of strictly dramatic expediency. And for that matter, how is he charging this thing? It's just lazy writing.

I hate complaining about plot holes; I think it’s generally lazy criticism, and anyway they tend to be bothersome only when film is already not working for some other reason. A movie that has you appropriately entranced need not bother with logic, so I usually try to focus on why a film has me bored enough to notice plot holes, rather than the holes themselves. But I bring them up here because I think it helps illustrate the way the film struggles to establish a clear identity for itself. Several reviewers have postulated, for example, that this should be read as, essentially, a fairy tale for adults. Which, fine, the very concept of a “fairy tale for adults” is already a little insulting, but some people obviously get off on that, who am I to judge. If that’s so, grousing about logic is missing the point. But the minute you call it a fairy tale, you are irrecoverably giving up on the idea of muckraking realism for a cause, and that is, frankly, where the movie's actual passions seem to lie. You can have brutal, journalistic naturalism, or you can have symbolic whimsy; crudely sewing the two approaches together is self-defeating. And of the two approaches on display here, the naturalistic drama is far and away more effective, which makes you resent the constant intrusions of “fairy tale” material that doesn't seem to arise naturally from the premise, and in fact often feels like an active detriment. At one point, a kid's stuffed tiger comes to life via disconcerting computer animation and interacts with our heroine. Why? There's nothing, like, symbolic happening here. It feels like an affectation for its own sake. Likewise, Estrella's “three wishes” which are doomed to turn out badly. If we're not meant to take this literally, as a simplistic plot mechanic, well... how should we take it? It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a thing that would be in a fairy tale, I guess. But in a fairy tale, at least it would have a moral, the obvious “be careful what you wish for.” Here, I don’t see how that message has any bearing. The final wish, in particular, seems like such a transparently manipulative, arbitrary setup that it made me actively angry. This is not using magical realism to communicate mysterious hidden realities; this is just using it as a lazy crutch to set up a tearjerker moment which would otherwise have to be more subtly written.

I will grant that the movie eventually works up a suitable climax, which does manage to tie its thriller plot into its vestigial horror imagery, at least narratively, if not really thematically. It's as cheap and calculating as everything else here, but at least it's marginally satisfying, and I was, I suppose, invested enough in the story by this point to be glad of that. It's a dithering, facile movie, but it's not a terrible one, as far as these things go; I think I resented it more than I really disliked it. If I hadn’t read all those glowing reviews beforehand, I’d probably be willing to write it off as a mediocre but well-meaning little tearjerker drama, one that doesn’t really work but deserves credit for trying. But I think it’s gotten plenty of credit for trying already.

* I should be said that it’s always a tricky business to evaluate dialogue that’s been translated into subtitled; it’s possible this plays more organically in its original Spanish.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s something they say, and the movie is very much about how kids deal with fear by escaping to fantasy.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Mexico
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Very, very light ghost movie trops
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No, although we hear about a tiger attack
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, ghosts
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	I find the little animated Tiger quite creepy in a live-action WHINNE THE POOH kind of way.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever you think about Del Toro, this shit isn’t as easy as he makes it look.

This is exactly the kind of movie that makes one wish for a half-thumb; I felt like giving it just two was too harsh, because it's nowhere near as hapless as, say, THE BEING. But three makes it sound like a vague positive, and I can't quite go that far either. Think of it as two thumbs and a pinkie.