Tigers Are Not Afraid

Director: Issa López

Country/Distributor: Mexico, Shudder

Opened: August 21

SOON AFTER A TITLE CARD PAYS ITS respects to the 200,000 people abducted and killed in Mexico’s ongoing drug war, we watch a young girl, Estrella, enter her empty house and encounter an unthinkable silence. She leavesschool early after gunfire shatters her classroom windows; on her walk home, she passes a bloody corpse veiled by a rug, and sees kids playing limbo with caution tape. Despite the world around her, Estrella (Paola Lara) stays fairly composed, until she calls out to her mother and hears nothing in return.

Grappling with that absence propels Estrella into her imagination—not to construct a rosier reality,, all of whom have lost their families to human trafficking and organized crime. Writer-director Issa López openly distances her story from sensationalistic depictions of this conflict; when these kids happen to watch a movie filled with gunfights, they groan. Instead, López thoughtfully weds magic realism to horror tropes as Estrella processes her mother’s disappearance. Allotted three wishes, fairy-tale-style, by a teacher during the lockdown, Estrella first asks for her mother to return—only for her to reappear as a reanimated plastic-wrapped corpse. This supernatural manifestation of grief may evoke Guillermo del Toro, an avowed López fan, but López, herself a novelist, embraces literary influences like Gabriel Gárcia Márquez’s as a serpentine trickle of blood pursues Estrella down hallways, history’s traumas physically enter the present.