The Movie: Tigers Are Not Afraid aka Vuelven
The Director: Issa López
The Cast: Paola Lara, Juan Ramón López, Tenoch Huerta, Ianis Guerrero, Rodrigo Cortes
The Story: A dark fairy tale about a gang of five children trying to survive the horrific violence of the cartels and the ghosts created every day by the drug war.
The Review:
I can definitely see why Issa López' haunting fairy tale has won numerous film festival awards including Best Director at Fantastic Fest 2017. Being a dark and creepy fantasy tale, there are immediate comparisons to Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, one of my all time favorite movies, but it also very much stands on it's own as it has a more grounded in reality feel to it. What's most interesting is how she twists and turns our concepts of evil and what it is supposed to look like and, by the end of the movie, the audience is left with what I would describe as an uncomfortable optimism.
The special effects are minimal although highly effective when used and the scariest bits of the movie come from unexpected sources rather than depending on classic tricks of the trade. López forces the audience to rethink ideas of mortality and the afterlife which, in a strange way, actually made me think of Pixar's Coco which covers similar subject matter although in a completely different way. I feel like the Brothers Grimm are somewhere looking down on this homage to their dark and twisted tales with honest appreciation of a job well done.
Tigers Are Not Afraid is an official selection of the 2018 Seattle International Film Festival.
TwoOhSix.com coverage for the 2017 Seattle International Film Festival.
I watched it the last year, it's an amazing movie, the good critiques are justified. From the beginning to the end this movie is a hard but enjoyable journey. It's really sad that in Mexico it was unnoticed due to movies like Coco and Thor or the short time it was on exhibition.
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