A classic film where all the elements come together perfectly

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 2016)

Sicario is directed with a superb certainty by Denis Villeneuve with an original eye to the placement of the human body within both the frame and the physical spaces examined by the camera. Mr Villeneuve expands on symbolic arrangements used so effectively by Alfred Hitchcock. The unexpected location of a corpse, or the glimpse of a key person through an array of mirrors, staples Hitchcock's visual language is redeployed with the same eerie effects. In Psycho Hitchcock took particular care with the bathroom, the place where our animal obscenities are flushed or washed away, the portal between human filth and the charade of normality. In the famous shower scene the camera can only travel so far in its exploration of the drain, it is safe to conclude that what lies beyond it is unimaginable. Mr Villeneuve however allows his camera to go even further into the dark space we would prefer not to think about.
Sicario leads us with increasing intensity to the place where Monsters and Myths are born as embodied by Benecio del Toro's character Alejandro.
One myth that is synchronous with Alejandro is "Medellin." it says much about the quality of writing of Taylor Sheridan (Sons of Anarchy) that the moment one of the corrupted see Alejandro they say the word "Medellin" though at least in the case of the small time cop who is a cartel courier it is a surprising conclusion to instantly make. That is not the point Alejandro is Medillin, the locus of balance and control in a world where the insanity rules.
Josh Brolin whose character functions as a chorus (he will reveal Alejandro's back story) explains that "Medellin" refers to a time of control. In fact it was the place where a Colombian super cartel emerged only to be destroyed by a rival with the overt support of America. Emily Blunts motivation for (Kate Macer) volunteering to take the ride over the border with Alejandro and Company is the proposition that in 6 months every house in the U.S.A used by the cartels will be rigged with explosives. It does not need a psychoanalytical approach to imagine the disintegration of social order occurring not just in the collapse of individuals into substance abuse but the house next door as well.
Throughout Sicario we see corpses tightly packed in walls (Edgar Allen Poe would have approved), living bodies contorted into planes and buses, the dead and the living jostling each other in tunnels (lit with a phosphorescent hue of night vision goggles), and bodies subdued at anonymous transit stations. The only moments of physical freedom occurs at the end the soccer game played by children, a game that continues despite the ominous reminders of reality in the form of gunfire over the horizon.
Woven into the visual narrative are superb slow pans over endless border fences, empty desert and amorphous mountain ranges, leading us closer to the place that gave birth to Alejandro, the palatial retreat of his nemesis Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cedillo note perfect in his mix of arrogance and practicality). It is in fact Fausto who will respond to Alejandro with the words "The people who sent you, do you think they are any different? Who do you think we learnt it from?" What redeems Alejandro is the exchange where Fausto dismisses the dropping of Alejandro's young daughter into a vat of acid as just "business". Mr del Toro responds with a line enunciated from his very bones "For me it was personal". His awful revenge involves killing a clueless wife and two well bred boys who happen to be at the table with Dad. Julio Cedillo at that point switches registers to a kind of executive distress, Alejandro is not playing by the rules, he had expected to be executed out of sight of the children, his moral blindness becomes ours as we watch a family murdered in the context of a satisfying climax.
An interesting moment occurs during the "interrogation scene," with the highly secured prisoner who has information that may be vital to Alejandro's mission. It is an obvious humiliation for Alejandro's to push crotch in front of the prisoners face, who is now terrified, knowing full well that the time of Medillin's revival is imminent which can only mean that Fausto is to be taken down. Over the sound of tortured screams and beating the camera drift towards a drain referencing the shower scene from "Psycho". What is going on in the room is the bestial reality that we would wish to dispose of, to hide from, the fact that in the name of civilisation we must become animals ourselves. The binary becomes a loop, a circle, a drain.
The binary reaches into the very internal architecture of Alejandro himself. Despite Kate (Emily Blunt) reminding him of his beloved daughter he is willing to kill her in order to get legal absolution for his unique execution of justice. Her refusal to sign a document in his mind is her suicide. At the end of the scene as he ambles away into an anonymous car park Kate is pointing the same gun he had pressed under her china few moments earlier at him from her balcony. Alejandro pauses and waits for the shot, he is already dead. Kate puts down the weapon, broken but human. Alejandro continues walking, he has willingly left civilisation behind in the name of a restorative myth and in so doing has become the unimaginable, the thing that would disrupt causality and destroy the state of things as they are. In other words death itself.