‘Sujo’ Review: A Quieter Take on Growing Up in the Drug War | Sundance 2024

Sujo, premiering in the 2024 Sundance Film Festival’s World Dramatic Competition, is the third feature collaboration between Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. Their previous film, Identifying Features, took both the Audience and Grand Jury prizes in the 2020 competition before going on to win 9 awards including Best Picture at the Ariel Awards (Mexico’s Oscars). That movie, about a mother trying to find her son crossing paths with a boy trying to find his mother around the Mexico-US border, was a slow burn that built to a shocking and powerful conclusion. Sujo shares its predecessor’s slow pace and its sensitive treatment of the violence facing Mexico, but the impact is muted by a more predictable and never fully satisfying story.

The title character (played by Kevin Uriel Aguilar Luna as a child and Identifying Features’ breakout star Juan Jesús Varela as a young adult) is the son of the feared sicario Josue, known as “The Eighth” (Juan Jesús Varela Hernández). In the first of the film’s four episodic chapters, Sujo becomes an orphan and narrowly avoids being killed himself. He’s taken in by his aunt Nemesia (Yadira Perez Esteban) who tries to keep him away from a life of crime, but as he grows up, Sujo finds himself torn between the conflicting desires of continuing his father’s legacy and breaking free from it. The cartel experiences of his friends Jai (Alexis Jassiel Varela) and Jeremy (Jairo Hernández Ramírez) prove a cautionary tale, while the professor Susan (Sandra Lorenzano) may prove to be his lifeline to a brighter future.

Often we see stories about the drug war to be told in a dramatic and violent fashion, but Sujo strenuously avoids sensationalism. The film’s approach to depicting violence is demonstrated in one of its first scenes, shot from the young Sujo’s perspective in the backseat of a car: Josue is going to kill someone, but he’s not going to do it until both he and his victim are out of his son’s line of sight. The dad even takes a break from his business to turn on the car’s radio to help the boy fall asleep  – “I don’t want you to remember any of this,” he tells him. In later scenes, we’ll hear a gunshot or see a fire, but in contrast to the fleeting but disturbing depictions of graphic violence that punctuated Identifying Features, Sujo keeps all the gory details at a distance.

This restraint makes sense as a way to distance the film from any glorification of violence as well as to keep the thematic focus on the impacts that the drug trade has on families. Yet while this approach is respectable, Sujo often threatens to bore viewers over its leisurely paced two hour runtime. It’s an unusually quiet film, with restrained performances and very little in the way of musical score. The situations are sometimes enough to build tension even through minimalism, but at other times, the movie is a bit patience-testing, without the same dramatic payoff that made this patience-testing feel worth it in the filmmakers’ previous film. Sujo’s central conflict is sympathetic enough, but it’s not exactly something we’ve never seen before, and while the choice to leave his future ambiguous holds the final act back from fully falling into “inspirational teacher movie” cliches, it also limits the amount of catharsis there is to be had.

The directors’ sense of restraint also bleeds into the film’s aesthetic, which is visually very washed out. Each chapter was filmed using different lenses to achieve different moods, but the impact of these differences is subtle enough that it’s hard to notice them. Though there’s not as many stunning visuals as in Identifying Features, and certainly nothing as jaw-dropping as that film’s long pan-out gradually revealing a forest as a reflection, Rondero and Valadez can still compose a memorable image when they feel like it – light peeking through the curtains and door-frame of a pitch-black room, Sujo perfectly composed amidst a background of street art – and deliver some striking transitions – a fog filling a hallway as it becomes the outside, a key unlocking a door to the night sky. Oh, the night skies in the movie look fantastic – either the sky must be impeccably clear where they shot this or the special effects team deserves a lot more credit than they’re likely to receive on such a naturalistic movie. The use of animals for poetic imagery is also noteworthy, particularly a framing device involving a horse that bookends the film.

Sundance’s official plot description for Sujo technically spoils a detail that the final scene of the movie plays as a reveal, but this spoilage feels like it isn’t so much an act of negligence as an admittance that this is the type of movie where “spoilers” don’t really matter. You mostly know where this film is going from the start, and if there’s anything you don’t know, it’s not something the film is going to answer you directly. It’s about the experience and calling attention to the issues it raises. Sujo is thematically sensitive and artfully made, but if you’re not precisely on its quiet wavelength, it’s ultimately a little underwhelming and far from a must-see. 

Grade: C+

This review is from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.