Somos.

Even in episode one, we get a sense of the culture of silence and fear already established; of the cartel’s growing influence; and of the hundreds of lives and hopes that will be extinguished by the season’s end.

The series is less successful when its focus is on plot. ... Fortunately, at no point does Somos ever become too weighted toward the clumsily plotted side. The how and why of what happened in Allende are important, but less so than the sprawling experience of the people the very bad thing happened to.

The series is at once well constructed and slightly less than convincing. ... The finale is rough going, though the death and destruction for the most part take place at a distance or off-screen; the filmmakers wisely do not overplay the violence. They don’t need to, after a five-episode build-up. Because “Somos.” doesn’t so much resolve as just cease.

A lot of the acting – some by non-professionals – is unobtrusive to the point of not really being a performance. There are story arc problems, too, with narratives fading out then suddenly zooming back in, or stopping abruptly, their significance lost in a dusty murk of competing plotlines. ... Where Somos does succeed is in evoking the singular tensions of a place such as Allende.

[James] Schamus, writer Monika Revilla, and directors Álvaro Curiel and Mariana Chenillo struggle with tone, often feeling like they’re not humanizing the people who died in Allende, but turning them into two-dimensional TV characters. Without the necessary depth, the people of Allende in “Somos” are like ghosts, and the whole project lacks anything other than tragedy to real[ly] hold onto.