107 min | R | November 5, 2021 | Netflix
A Cop Movie follows two Mexico City officers through patrols and bribes, then reveals the cops on screen are actors playing real people. The documentary becomes a study of how a uniform turns a person into a performance. Clever as hell, and a little cold to the touch.
A Cop Movie opens as a documentary about two Mexico City police officers. Teresa and Montoya are partners on the force and partners in life. They patrol, they take bribes, and they describe the work in their own voices. Then the film pulls the floor out from under you. The officers you have been watching are played by actors, and the movie becomes a study of how a person performs authority and how authority performs itself.
Mónica del Carmen plays Teresa with a wary stillness that reads as exhaustion and calculation at once. She carries the weight of a woman who joined the force to escape one trap and found another. Raúl Briones plays Montoya with a swagger that curdles into doubt. He shows you a man who learned the uniform’s choreography before he understood its cost. The two actors train at a real academy and let the regimen reshape their bodies on camera, so their fatigue is not acted. It is earned.
Alonso Ruizpalacios directs from a script he wrote with David Gaytán, and the film’s power lives in its cuts. The editing splices the real officers’ recorded testimony against the actors’ reenactments until the seam disappears. A voice on the soundtrack belongs to one person while the face on screen belongs to another. The structure refuses to let you settle into either documentary or fiction. Ruizpalacios takes the tools the police use, the uniform and the script and the rehearsed line, and turns them back on the institution.
A Cop Movie wants to know what the badge does to the person who wears it. It finds its answer in the gap between the officer and the actor playing the officer. The conceit is sharp and the execution is disciplined, but the film holds its subjects at arm’s length. You admire the formal trick more than you feel the lives underneath it. The result interrogates the system with rigor and leaves the people inside it a little out of reach.