Lost in the Night (2023): the environmental thriller too pulpy for Cannes? (Review)

Barcelona-born Mexican director Amat Escalante made his name internationally when he won Best Director at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for Heli – a slow, unflinching film that posited cartel violence and police brutality becoming mutually supportive forces. It drew plaudits, but also some accusations of feeding into American preconceptions of Mexico as a lawless, barbarous narco-state. Perhaps Escalante was also concerned about this since he followed it up with The Untamed – a film about a woman having sex with an alien tentacle monster, which is not a particularly important social issue in Mexico.

After three seasons working as a director-for-hire on Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, Escalante is back with Lost in the Night, which is released in UK cinemas today. Its Cannes premiere saw audiences more confused than ever about what kind of director Escalante is, and while general cinema audiences might be more forgiving, there’s a risk inherent in being the pulpiest thing on offer at a festival like Cannes. The Hollywood Reporter‘s review suggested that the depiction of the film’s upper-crust villains “called for vicious Michael Haneke treatment (or Michel Franco, to keep it in Mexico)”, which generously assumes Franco would recognise the awful rich people as villains, but that’s another discussion. A wider audience is less likely to reject the film for not resembling Code Unknown, but as an art film, Lost in the Night is maybe too genre-influenced, and as a genre film, it’s beguilingly arty.

It’s not a perfect film. Its two-hour-plus runtime is maybe a little indulgent, and the most tiring aspect of Heli – the social commentary about the youth and their social media sites – recurs to similarly dull effect. Equally, most of the virtues of Heli are present as well. Most discussions around Heli centred around its long-take torture scene, which does align the film with a certain kind of audience-punishing arthouse. But it also contained a detectable streak of black humour, and even – in a shot of a glass of water wobbling as a huge police vehicle approached – a reference to Jurassic Park.

These elements recur in Lost in the Night. There’s plenty of satire on offer: one of its most privileged villains is a Spanish-born artist with a taste for shock tactics, which suggests Escalante is willing to include himself in the film’s moral critique this time. It also features a love triangle, with Juan Daniel García Treviño’s protagonist Emiliano caught between a sexually uninhibited rich girl and a sweetheart from back home who’s… well, also pretty sexually uninhibited, because it’s an Amat Escalante film. (For those wondering, Lost in the Night is equal-opportunities when it comes to nudity) It’s an archetypal situation, but it works. Despite the constant discourse about how television is supposedly so much more sophisticated than cinema these days, it’s clear that Escalante’s time on Narcos: Mexico has sharpened his instincts for brisk, commercial storytelling.

In particular, Lost in the Night may have been inspired by a certain recent hit which gave renewed hope to anyone dreaming of a wide audience for non-Anglophone film: Parasite. Like Bong Joon-Ho’s historic Oscar-winner, Lost in the Night follows a man of humble means infiltrating a rich family and discovering a slew of uncomfortable secrets in the process. Put like that, these are classic Gothic narratives, and while it would be stretching the case to describe Lost in the Night as a horror film it isn’t short of disquieting scenes. There’s nothing as visceral as Heli‘s showcase torture scene or The Untamed‘s tentacle monster, and maybe the film would stand out more if there was. But there’s a fairly unending stream of things to creep you out, from the close-ups of wince-inducing wounds to the rich mother cooing over her daughter’s new breasts, to the police brutality and corruption that once again forms the backbone of Escalante’s narrative.

The most interesting shift from Escalante’s earlier work is this: the corruption is not drug-related this time. Emiliano is driven to infiltrate the Aldama family when his mother goes missing after protesting the opening of a new mine. The disappearance is viewed completely fatalistically, with no-one holding out much hope that she’s going to turn up alive and well. You could see this as a roundabout way of commenting on Mexico’s drug wars, which have also involved plenty of disappearances. It seems more likely, though, that Lost in the Night really is about what it claims to be about: the intersection of environmental justice and class inequality. Escalante is always good at visual metaphors, and there’s a particularly good running motif here, as conversations are frequently interrupted by the distant boom of the mine being explosively excavated. We’re all guilty of treating environmental issues as noises-off, the implication goes, until they shake the ground under our feet.

Graham’s Archive – Lost in the Night