94 min | NR | January 28, 2022 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
A wealthy Panama City gallery owner is buried in grief for her dead son. A wounded boy from the slum below her tower shows up at her door, and she lets him in. What starts as charity becomes something neither of them can afford to lose.
Alicia is a wealthy gallery owner in Panama City grieving the death of her young son. Chief is a fourteen-year-old boy from the slum below her apartment who runs errands for local gangsters. When he turns up wounded at her door, she takes him in. The film is about the class wall that runs straight through one city. It is also about whether a woman who has lost a child can let a living one matter to her without consuming him.
Ilse Salas plays Alicia as a woman sealed inside her own apartment and her own loss. She does not soften into a maternal figure. She holds Chief at a distance and lets the warmth leak out against her will, which makes it land harder. Fernando Xavier De Casta plays Chief with a wariness that never tips into cuteness. He watches Alicia the way a kid sizes up whether an adult is a mark or a threat, and the performance carries the knowledge that this is the only world he gets.
Abner Benaim writes and directs with a refusal to sentimentalize the gap between his two characters. He shoots the apartment as a cold high-rise box of glass and hard surfaces and the streets below as crowded and warm and dangerous. The camera stays close on faces and lets long silences run instead of scoring the emotion for the audience. Benaim withholds the music until it would do real work, and the restraint keeps the relationship from curdling into a fable.
The film knows the trap it is walking into. The poor boy who heals the rich woman is an old and lazy story. Benaim grounds it in a specific city with a specific economy of violence, and he refuses the clean ending the setup promises. The result is a two-hander that earns its grief instead of borrowing it.