Movie Review - Prayers for the Stolen

Premiering at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Tatiana Huezo adapts the novel by Jennifer Clement, a Mexican-American author. This film is the official submission from Mexico for Best International Feature at the 94th Academy Awards. It focuses on a girl, coming of age in a rural village that's under siege from a drug cartel, terrorizing the women there. The people in general are compelled to work in the poppy fields, which helps supply the drugs. Yet, there's also incidents of girls disappearing. The protagonist doesn't totally understand at first what's happening, but the implication is that the cartel is engaging in human trafficking of these disappeared girls.

The film at first feels like Sean Baker's The Florida Project (2017) where the majority of it is told from the point-of-view of a child or children in a harrowing environment where horrible things are happening often in the periphery. The tone is ominous because one is aware of these horrible things but we're not really seeing them because we mostly remain in the child's perspective and the adults around the child are shielding them and thus the audience from those horrible things until those things can't be shielded any longer.

Ana Cristina Ordóñez González plays Ana, a little girl, maybe no older than 8 or 9. She lives with her single mother in a rural area in Mexico. Her father is away somewhere trying to earn money to send back to them, but her mother has been unable to contact him on the phone. She seems to live a regular life where she goes to school, has fun hanging out with her two friends and comes home. However, she notices that strange things are happening. She notices that certain little girls, little girls from her class in school, have disappeared. She's even noticed that certain people have been attacked or abused. Yet, she doesn't know why or openly questions it.

Mayra Batalla co-stars as Rita, the mother to Ana. She lives in an impoverished area and in an impoverished home that is on or near a farm. She seems to do some work as a maid. She also does some work in a poppy field. It's not explicitly said or shown, but poppy fields can be used in the production of opioids and other drugs. When Rita goes to the beauty salon and talks to the other women in the village, they comment and are afraid of the men who are outside with guns. Those men reference a cartel, which could be a drug cartel.

We don't really get much information about this cartel. It hangs as a nebulous threat, again in the periphery. The cartel seems to be targeting girls, possibly for human trafficking. Again, it's not explicit, but Rita has Ana's hair cut to a very short length. Ostensibly, it's done to cure her of head lice, but there's an implication later that she did so in order to pass off her daughter as actually her son. It's not a deception that is done for anyone in the village. It's a cover story for any potential cartel members who show up. This film is so subtle and lacking in exposition that it's not even clear if Ana is aware of her mother's motivations and thought-process.

Marya Membreño plays Ana as a teenager. The film has a time-jump where we see the slightly older Ana, reportedly at age 13. She still has a short hair-cut that makes her look like a boy, but, for anyone who lives in the town, they know she's not a boy. She clearly has a crush on her male schoolteacher. She also has even stronger romantic feelings for the brother of one of her best friends. Margarito, played by Julián Guzmán Girón, is the teenage hunk and bullrider who catches Ana's eye. The scenes of Ana and Margarito as kids are cute, but whatever relationship they have as adolescents isn't that developed. Yet, her relationship with him and her friends contribute to her desire to stay in the village, despite her mother's insistence to leave, but I'm not sure the film ever gets us into her head well enough to understand her desire.

Noche de Fuego.
Rated R for some language.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 50 mins.

Available on Netflix.