Hal Kitchen
A political drama with a dark comic edge, Lost in the Night satirises the sheltered super-rich’s blind malefactions in a similar fashion to last year’s Palme d’Or winner, though for my money far more astutely and entertainingly than the vague and repetitive Triangle of Sadness. Lost in the Night focuses less on the class divide and worker exploitation (though it certainly touches on that too) and more on how brutal, fascist regimes make themselves useful to the wealthy and secure their luxury.
Mexican teenager Emiliano (Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino) has spent the last three years looking for answers after the disappearance of his mother, who was run off the road on the return journey from protesting the development of a new mine. His search has been fruitless until, in his deathbed confession, a local cop reveals the name of the wealthy local family who told them to kill her. So with the help of his girlfriend Jazmine (Maria Fernanda Osio), Emiliano goes undercover as a handyman in the seemingly innocent household to try and find proof. There’s shades of Parasite in the film’s acerbic comic tone, air of danger and upstairs-downstairs dynamic, but Escalante’s a starker, more remote director than Bong Joon-ho, with the eeriness of the film’s arid setting providing the model for the film’s uneasy tone. As he becomes a member of the household, Emiliano gets to know each member of the family and in turn, he becomes a foil for their respective emotional needs, and Garcia Trevino’s suppressed exasperation at this provides some of the film’s best comic beats.
The film handles its attacks on the rich with refreshing nuance, tact and insight, characterising their willful blindness and complicity with violent oppression as mere complacency and convenience but no less dangerous for it. The film is a distant cousin of a work like Michel Franco’s New Order, but instead of reveling in the portrayal of the most brutal acts imaginable, resulting in a despairing and cruel film, Lost in the Night focuses on the character of the perpetrators and the survivors of violence, exploring the messiness of a world subject to authoritarian rule and the earnest desires of the people who populate it. The Aldama family are spoiled, vapid and entitled, but they’re not plain evil, they have consciences and like to think they listen to them. conceptual artist Rigoberto (Fernando Bonilla) uses art as a means to assuage his guilt, convincing himself he’s performing a valid social function when really he’s just serving his own ego. His wife, singer and actress Carmen, has a more mercenary view, living in a more successful form of denial. All the while, corrupt local cop Ruben (Jero Medina) lingers on the sidelines, the living embodiment of a loaded Chekov’s gun.
There are multiple plot points that raise questions the film doesn’t fully answer and which occupy a nuanced role in the narrative. For example, Rigoberto is presently being subject to harassment and threats from a religious cult he offended with one of his more incendiary art works depicting their leader. Both antihero and villain, these cultists could represent religious community in the abstract, portraying them as outwardly harmless, but sanctimonious and capable of extreme cruelty in private or pursuit of a moral crusade. But it remains ambiguous whether they are truly the ones persecuting the family, if so, they’re no heroes, doing abhorrent things to dogs and children for absurd and inaccurate reasons, but there could be more going on here than the film outwardly states. When the populace does take collective action, it’s all too often for the wrong reasons or to the wrong ends.
Similarly, Emiliano has a girlfriend but Monica (Ester Exposito) the daughter of the house—an influencer who has accrued a moderate following by staging suicide attempts—has taken a liking to the handsome kid, who doesn’t do much to rebuff her attentions. She has a backstory involving sexual violence in the entertainment industry and this is a recurrent motif throughout the film, though not one that takes shape into an informed or precise perspective. It’s unclear if these elements are intended to create sympathy for the characters, illustrate how authoritarian systems cannibalize their more vulnerable members or just score a few cheap points by name-checking a contemporary issue.
But although some of its secondary themes feel a bit tacked on and underdeveloped, the main story is the film’s great strength, with stakes, urgency and color in abundance. It’s closest relative may be something like Bacurau, and while it can’t match that film’s ferocity, it’s an engaging effort to mine a similar vein. Perhaps its tone can come across as uncharacteristically naive in places, but I believe this is an intentional contrast with the bleakness of its subject matter. We’re skeptical that Emiliano and Jazmine have the future we might wish for them, and the film’s optimism is tempered and muted as a result. There’s no romance or grace here, it’s hard to feel the sincerity when it does come and perhaps a fuller film could have found room for it, but Lost in the Night has a bitter potency that has little need of tenderness or redemption: it’s acerbic and dryly funny and draws its drama out to create effortless discomfort.
