Robe of Gems

A Bolañesque waking nightmare, the film insists that we come to terms with it rather than straightforwardly enjoy it.

A visually stunning, thoughtful, and profoundly unsettling study of the impact of male violence on the lives of three women played out in the pitiless sunlight of rural southern Mexico, Natalia López Gallardo’s feature debut Robe Of Gems is creepy in all the right ways.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.

Robe of Gems isn’t an easy film. Its harrowing content is devoid of optimism and its pacing ensures we wallow in the resulting suffering even if very little of it is actually shown on-screen.

The problem, then, is that too much of this is dispiriting without also being enlightening — the view Gallardo takes is almost that of a bird’s eye, showing much from an emotional remove but revealing little beyond surface-level horrors and characters so numb to it all that we’re left with little choice but to feel the same way.

[López Gallardo] tends to eschew straightforward storytelling for something so elusive that her film nearly escapes us for its first half, until the pieces gradually fit together and we manage to make some sense of the plot, if not entirely what the director is going for.