Buy Me a Gun

Director Julio Hernández Cordón doesn’t specify when his semi-post-apocalyptic seventh feature film Buy Me a Gun takes place. But the violent Mexico he portrays, where – according to the opening crawl – “the women have disappeared and everything, absolutely everything is run by the cartels”, is not all that far from present-day Mexico as we see it on the news. The critic for The Hollywood News pegged it as somewhere between Beasts of the Southern Wild and Mad Max and that’s pretty accurate.

In this desolate landscape, Rogelio and his daughter Huck try to keep their heads above water (or in this case, above sand). Rogelio’s wife and their eldest daughter have already vanished, swallowed up by the cartels, and to protect her from the same fate Huck goes through life as a boy – though the group of ‘lost boys’ she hangs out with know better. Meanwhile Rogelio, who is the caretaker of a small baseball field, desperately tries to control his drug addiction while staying on the good side of the criminals running things.

It soon becomes clear that Rogelio and Huck’s situation is bound to turn bad at some point. Guatemalan/Mexican director Cordón, who’s established a reputation with completely independent, anarchistic low-budget films, is not out to surprise us with surprising plot twists. He prefers to work in unexpected little flourishes of whimsy here and there: the ingenious camouflage tactics of Huck’s playmates; a puff of pink smoke coming from a trumpet; a battlefield littered with bodies shown in paper cutouts.

But the true heart of Buy Me a Gun lies in the relationship between father and daughter. The film blends their outlooks – Rogelio’s growing despair, Huck’s nagging, naïve hope – to a fable about the extreme consequences of drug violence that is as fragile as it is moving.

Joost Broeren-Huitenga

Trailer