The Box

There is this marvelous hard-boiled narrative style Vigas employs, with long periods without dialogue and little exposition. The way the intrigue is built as the picture progresses almost takes us into thriller territory. This is the cinematic storm the filmmaker creates here when a child’s yearning meets the brutality of an outlaw land.

Superb ... 'The Box' may see [Vigas] relocating to Mexico, but it’s otherwise wholly of a piece with his debut in its terse, cut-to-the-quick refinement, its loaded, exquisitely composed images, and its fixation on shifting, complex man-versus-boy dynamics.

La Caja is a canny blend of detective story, political drama and rites of passage vignette, and is the sort of film that comes across as so simple and direct that it’s easy to miss how meticulously conceived and constructed it is.

The Box lacks the sort of ardor that made From Afar so memorable. Here, not all the major beats amount to substantial commentary on this relationship or the context. However, there are choices and plot elements that confirm the director’s narrative sagacity.

Director Lorenzo Vigas, who collaborated on the script with Paula Markovitch and Laura Santullo, adeptly manoeuvres things so that the film slides effortlessly from mystery to criminal story to quasi-Greek tragedy, changing registers with subtle alterations of tone. The landscape – vast, desiccated, menacing – is practically a character in its own right, full of inscrutable secrets like Hatzín’s own deadpan face.

Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.

Only touching on something interesting formally in the hum of factory machines and the depressing deadness of low-rent diners, it feels like the kind of work where one uses the descriptor “well-made” as a backhanded compliment. The director pulls off his “vision,” but frankly it doesn’t seem that hard to think up.