A Wolfpack Called Ernesto (2023): Experimental look at Mexican Gang Culture (Review)

As one of the subjects of Everardo Gonzáles’s new film A Wolfpack Called Ernesto puts it, “you get involved by looking”. Where theatre has monologues and novels have first-person narration, film has the close-up as its signature method of encouraging you to identify with a character’s emotions. You could chart the history of cinema in epochal close-ups: Maria Falconetti’s Joan of Arc, Jean-Pierre Léaud staring out to sea, Mia Goth grinning through the end credits. Which is why it’s so bold for Gonzáles’s film, released in UK cinemas this weekend by Sovereign, to eschew it entirely. A Wolfpack Called Ernesto shoots all of its interviewees from behind, with iPhone cameras attached to their back with a special harness. As they wander around Mexico, interviews playing out on the soundtrack, they begin to merge into one, a Mexican everyman who might be a victim or a perpetrator of gun violence depending on whether it’s his unlucky day.

That, at least, is the theory. I have to admit that, while I was watching the film, this gestalt concept only registered with me as a vague sense that these interviews all felt of a piece. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and A Wolfpack Called Ernesto certainly works as a consistently fraught mood piece. Its long tracking shots giving the audience a sense of being dragged helplessly into danger by protagonists they’ll never fully know. It benefits immeasurably from Andrés Sánchez’s pulsing electronic score, which picks up on both the club-friendly throb and deep, death-besotted fatalism of the trap music these kids probably listen to. The other audio element, the interviews, hover over the footage, their words uncoupled from any face that might be speaking them. You assume Gonzáles’s starting point was the difficulty in getting people involved in this world to speak on camera – his most widely-seen film, Devil’s Freedom, features masked interviewees – but if the device is born out of necessity it earns its place artistically. A Wolfpack Called Ernesto has the feel of a troubling waking dream, a feeling that chimes disturbingly well with the affectless nihilism it depicts.

If this is all you want from the film – an experiential, experimental look inside an underworld most of us would rather never visit personally – it delivers, and I do think that’s a unique enough goal to recommend the film. It’s just that the bar for using avant-garde cinema techniques to make a statement about a humanitarian nightmare has just been set forbiddingly high by Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Comparing the two made me a little uneasy about what Gonzáles might be saying here – or, at the very least, his ability to reject unwanted readings of his film.

When you watch a film that’s been shot or edited in a way that’s radically different to a standard movie, you can respond in one of two ways. The first is to treat it as an error, as though Gonzáles simply forgot to shoot the reverse shots of his interviewees, or Glazer lost the footage showing the interior of the concentration camps. Since The Geek Show is not CinemaSins, I’m going to assume that all our readers will take the second option of trying to work out what the film might be trying to achieve. The Zone of Interest‘s most audacious gambits – only showing Auschwitz in the distance, removing as much plot as possible from Martin Amis’s source novel – all have a very clear moral purpose. It is a film designed to impress upon you the human capacity for ignoring a crime that is happening right in front of our faces.

Both The Zone of Interest and A Wolfpack Called Ernesto lack so much as a single scene of violence. This obviously means both films avoid the cheapest forms of exploitation, which is not something that can be said about every film concerning either Auschwitz or Mexican gang culture. It’s just that, in the case of Glazer’s film, anyone who hasn’t recently had their Twitter ban lifted by Elon Musk will be perfectly aware of the facts of the Holocaust, whereas in the case of A Wolfpack Called Ernesto we are not yet out of the fog of war. Rather than filling the gaps in Gonzáles’s film with our own context, we might instead fill them with our own preconceptions, biases and prejudices, and the issue doesn’t need any more of those.

I also found myself nagged by doubts about what Gonzáles meant to do by hybridising all his interviewees into the titular “Ernesto”. Is he saying that every victim might also be a perpetrator, and vice versa? If so, I’m not sure I agree with that – not least because, despite the whole aim of the film, several of the interviewees come across as perfectly individual. A more laudable motivation might be stressing the universality of a social problem too often viewed through a racial, othering lens. Hollywood films tend to treat Mexican gang violence as something inexplicable that happens down there, but the young gang members in A Wolfpack Called Ernesto sound callow, cocky and near-suicidally pessimistic by turns. They believe society’s dice are loaded against them from birth, so, as one says when justifying his decision to become a killer, “why not – I mean, it’ll be my turn to die one day, right?” In short, they sound heartbreakingly similar to young gang members everywhere.

Graham’s Archive – A Wolfpack Called Ernesto