Horror and fantasy are not means to escape this world, they are means to understand it, to talk about it, to make sense of that which makes no sense. Tigers Are Not Afraid, the brilliant film by Issa Lopez, tackles this head-on, crafting a dark fantasy of ghosts, wishes, and monsters, terrible beings that are still better than the alternative of a city choked on cartels and murder.
Tigers opens with children being tasked to write fairy tales in class, but there is very little magic in the offing as the film begins. Gunshots shatter the peaceful classroom, sending glass flying and people screaming. One of the students, Estrella, cowers under her desk. Seeing her panic, a teacher hands her three pieces of chalk and calls them ‘wishes’. Estrella’s day only gets worse from there, when she returns home to discover that her mother is not there. And as the hours become days and Estrella’s mother still does not come back, she uses one of the wishes to ask that her mother return.
And that’s when things begin to go very wrong.
Meanwhile, happening across town but in what might as well be another world, a boy named Shine is determined to make himself into a monster. He’s the leader of a small group of lost boys, all of them orphaned and abandoned by the ravages of a local cartel. Shine stalks the man he knows to be responsible, determined to kill him. Still just a boy, he can’t bring himself to kill the man, and so instead he steals a gun and a cell phone.
And that’s when things begin to go very, very wrong.
And when Estrella meets Shine, things go more wrong than any of these kids could have ever imagined.
Lopez’s features to date have been primarily comedies, but she makes the leap to…whatever genre you want to peg this as, with total ease. While her camera is handheld, there is still a sense of tremendous control, especially with the way that the fantastical elements are woven into the texture of the film. The streets and alleys and roofs are real as can be, but Lopez is still able to conjure painterly compositions, using light and shadow and color to create a richly textured world where magic can exist side-by-side with gritty earth.
While Lopez’s technical bonafides are impressive, her work with child actors is downright miraculous. Each of these kids is giving an incredible performance, not only in the big setpieces but in the quiet moments between storms. That handheld aesthetic works wonders here as well, as Lopez allows for moments that feel captures, moments of laughter and play and love that endear you deeply to each of these children and make you wish, desperately, that they all make it to the end of the film unharmed.
The film itself makes no such promise. While Tigers has moments of lyrical beauty, it is also profoundly ugly at times. Because Lopez refuses to flinch from the way the industry of drugs and murder chew up and spit out innocence and innocents alike, Tigers’ heart beats with righteous fury. Like some of the most galvanizing art out there, Tigers Are Not Afraid is profoundly angry, and while decades of books, documentaries, TV shows, and movies should well have inoculated us to cartel-based violence, by showing us these crimes and atrocities through the view of children, Lopez re-opens old wounds and reminds you of just how terrible these acts truly are.
I hope you don’t take away from this that Tigers Are Not Afraid is some kind of grim, monotonous slog through misery and grief. The film is funny and sweet and exciting and energetic, its sub-90 minutes whizzing by.
That energy only makes the totality of what Lopez has accomplished here all the more impressive. That Tigers Are Not Afraid is able to encompass such a huge landscape of emotional and thematic material in such a tight frame, that it’s able to go to such dark places without surrendering its ability to entertain or sacrifice a sense of hope…I’m kind of left flabbergasted by it.
Tigers Are Not Afraid is a stunning achievement. I look forward to tracking down the rest of Lopez’s work, and cannot imagine what sort of masterpieces she has in store going forward.
Find this movie. Watch this movie.
