159 min | R | November 4, 2022 | Netflix
A film director stands at the edge of death and the border between Mexico and the United States, and spends two and a half hours interrogating his own success. Alejandro G. Iñárritu builds a dream-logic confession out of memory, exile, and self-doubt. The trouble is that the man doing the confessing already thinks he is fascinating.
Silverio Gama is a Mexican journalist turned documentary filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles and returns to Mexico City to receive a major award. He drifts through a series of surreal episodes that blur memory, hallucination, and grief. A train car becomes a memory. A ballroom becomes a reckoning. Alejandro G. Iñárritu stages all of it as one man’s interior monologue about identity, success, and the cost of leaving home. The film is about a Mexican artist who fears he has become a tourist in his own country, and it cannot decide whether to forgive him for it.
Daniel Giménez Cacho plays Silverio as a man frozen between pride and shame. He carries the film through every dreamscape with a watchful stillness that anchors the chaos around him. Griselda Siciliani plays his wife Lucía with a directness that cuts through Silverio’s self-pity, especially in the scenes about a lost child. Íker Sánchez Solano and Ximena Lamadrid play his children Lorenzo and Camila, who challenge his decision to raise them as Americans. The family scenes give the film its only sustained emotional weight, and the film keeps abandoning them to chase another set piece.
Iñárritu and co-writer Nicolás Giacobone build the script as a string of dream sequences with no narrative spine. Darius Khondji shoots in wide-angle long takes that warp space at the edges of the frame, so the rooms bend and the crowds stretch into the distance. A sequence on the Zócalo turns the public square into a field of bodies, and the camera glides over them without a cut. The technique is precise. The problem is that Iñárritu deploys it to illustrate ideas he has already explained in dialogue, so the images decorate the argument instead of advancing it.
This is a film about a man who suspects his life is hollow and who responds by making a monument to that suspicion. Every flourish announces its own ambition. Every metaphor arrives pre-interpreted by a character who then explains what it means. Iñárritu has the craft to build any image he imagines, and here he imagines a director staring into a mirror for two and a half hours and calling the reflection the world. The result impresses and exhausts in equal measure, and it never earns the scale of its own self-regard.