“Tigers are Kings in this Kingdom of broken things.”
People die in horror movies all the time. It’s kind of a hallmark of the genre. What we don’t see as often is the emotional wreckage left behind. When someone is murdered – whether it’s a serial killer or something supernatural – it tears a rent in the fabric of reality. This was something that was not supposed to happen. Life is a ruin, it is wreckage, and everywhere we are surrounded by the ghosts of ordinary people. Tigers Are Not Afraid takes this approach and weaves its story through the narrative of the Mexican Drug Wars, which since 2006 have claimed the lives of 160,000 people, with 53,000 more just…gone. (Remember this movie came out in 2017, so those statistics are probably tragically out of date.) We don’t often think about ghosts as being something created through an act as craven and banal as murder.
Estrella is learning about fairy tales. This sets the tone for the rest of the film, which exists firmly in the world of magical realism that so permeates Mexican art, be it the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges, or films like Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth or Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, perhaps the finest of all Mexican films. There is gunfire heard outside the school, and as everyone hides on the floor, Estrella’s teacher presses into her hand three pieces of chalk. “Three wishes,” she says. Such is the spell cast by Tigers Are Not Afraid in its opening few minutes that we know very well that these are wishes in the literal sense.
Estrella returns to an empty home, and within moments we learn that her mother has been killed by the huascas – the bloodthirsty cartel with a stranglehold on the city. They’re dubbed narcosatanicos, which probably doesn’t need translation. Scenes in this film don’t transition so much as they glide together with the implacable pacing and logic of a dream. Soon Estrella finds herself in the company of a band of orphans, children left alone because their families were killed by the huascas. Led by Shine, the group soon forms a plan to kill Caco, a cartel enforcer.
Tigers Are Not Afraid describes itself as a fairy tale, and it lives up to that. Estrella is surrounded by inanimate creatures made flesh: a dragon flies off of a cell phone case, a snake slithers off the handle of a pistol. It’s as if Estrella is a warped version of a Disney princess, surrounded by animals who will see that she comes to no harm. It’s hard to tell if we’re supposed to take any of this literally, but my heart tells me we are. The lives of these children are so mired in tragedy, so defined by it, that some magical thinking is all that will get them through each day.
And there is magic in this movie, regardless of the bleak subject matter. One of the most striking shots is of a school of fish who have made a new home in a deep puddle. Its incongruity only adds to its power, and the idea that anywhere can be home if it has to be. Fairy tales and urban legends commingle here; we see a graffiti tiger moving about on walls, only to become flesh-and-blood in the film’s final scene. It’s a beautiful, stark contrast to the ugliness on display, which borders on resignation if not outright nihilism. A popular politician is running for office despite documented ties to human trafficking, torture, and murder. We see his TV ads and billboards constantly. Should it then be a surprise that he turns out to be the film’s main villain? Of course not, and Tigers isn’t going for surprise with the revelation.
Director Issa Lopez expertly utilizes her cast of non-actors. None of the principal child actors had any experience in front of a camera before acting in Tigers. They were trained in both acting and improvisation, which lends their performances a naturalistic air that you don’t get from an actor who brings their own baggage to the role (think of Yalitza Aparicio in Roma, or Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project). Even when conversations seem stilted, that works to the film’s advantage, because kids this young don’t always know how to talk to each other, or what to talk about. Paolo Loca, in particular, does an incredible job as Estrella. She has to convey heartbreak and determination, all tinged with a not-insignificant amount of terror, and does so ably. She’s a face to watch.
Tigers Are Not Afraid manages to find a note of quiet grace on which to end. It’s a hard road getting there, though; two of the children in Estrella’s group are gunned down. Lopez’s film doesn’t use these deaths for shock value or exploitation, and they both occur so matter-of-factly that it hammers home the unbearable reality of living in a world like this, where nothing is permanent and everything is eternal. This unnamed city is a land of ghosts, and thankfully one brave girl has found her way out of it.
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