Cold Metal

Óscar (Óscar Hernández) has escaped from rehab, while his brother Mario (Mario Banderas) is afflicted and confounded by “images that don’t belong to him.” One has disappeared physically, the other mentally, and both wander through the folds of Clemente Castor’s shape-shifting second feature, an entrancing modernist narrative whose drifting, nonlinear structure hints at the latent violence of displacement. In recurrent scenes shot with an ominous Lynchian sound design and tenebrous lighting, Mario explores a warren of underground caverns, before the narrative emerges, like a soul from limbo, into low-key neorealist vignettes depicting adolescent languor in the cramped interiors and sprawling streetscape of the working-class Mexico City suburb of Iztapalapa. Games and signs are a constant in the film from its opening scene of a carnival roulette game, the wheel spinning and the arrow pointing. Like Rivette, Castor rewrites his own rules and redraws his own map anew with every scene. Winner of the Prix Georges de Beauregard at FIDMarseille.