Critic Reviews

Heli is a stunning piece of filmmaking. It's a hypnotic, starkly beautiful, often disturbing drama that puts a working-class Mexican family in the cross hairs of its country's drug war.

A dead-eyed, lyrical art film that kicks you in the throat.

The film functions as clammy thriller as well as poetic agitprop.

If Heli lacks enough focus and thematic clarity to make it properly special, it's still winningly provocative and always compelling.

By film’s end, everyone has been transformed for the worst. Heli is a troubling and upsetting picture, a portrait of a broken country that seems to be beyond repair and a depiction of how violence and corruption, when left unchecked, taints saints and sinners alike, sparing no one.

Heli is a despairing, bleak watch. It's a slow, but unrelenting look at one young man's punishing loss of innocence amongst a society that has already decayed beyond understanding.

The film’s nihilism serves as a metaphor for the merciless death pit of Mexico’s drug war, but not much else.

The movie maintains a relentless grip all the same. Unlike the junior kingpins who bear witness to the film’s big blaze, audiences won’t watch in a passive state.

The emotional and political point through all this isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of the film has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.

Throughout the film [Escalante's] camera tends to be lurking in the middle distance; coolly observing everything that passes through its inquisitive frame, leaving the messy business of reaction to us.