Heli
Directed by Amat Escalante. Starring Armando Espitia, Andrea Vergara, Juan Eduardo Palacios. Official Competition, 105 min
****

When, in the early stages of this harsh, nihilistic depiction of life in contemporary Mexico, a young girl happens upon a cute little puppy, informed viewers will brace themselves for impending canicide. Sure enough, within half an hour, gun-wielding vandals have broken the unfortunate beast's neck. That's what happens in harsh, nihilistic depictions of life in contemporary Mexico. A few moments later, a young man has his penis set on fire. At this stage, a lady in my row made a conspicuously dramatic exit from the Salle Debussy. Welcome to the official competition.

It's worth being facetious about such issues, because, otherwise hugely powerful, the film lets itself down at these points. Amat Escalante, the director of the equally troubling Sangre – which played here at Un Certain Regard in 2005 – has made an impressively sinister drama about the way (to paraphrase Philip Larkin) man hands misery on to man. Unfortunately, incidents such as that involving the doomed puppy seem more than a little gratuitous. It's as if he is cutting his own skin so that he may later ostentatiously pick at the scab.

The excellent Armando Espitia plays the titular car-worker. As the film begins, Heli is living a humble, but tolerable, sort of life. Then Estela (Andrea Vergara), his young sister, becomes involved with an older police cadet named Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios). When the lad steals a bag of cocaine, he ends up attracting the hideous wrath of a gang of crooked cops. They break into his house, kill his father, torture Beto and Heli, strangle the dog, and kidnap Estela.

Shot with a cool distance, Heli has none of the gooey relish of a Gaspar Noé film. This is a less-connected cinema of cruelty. But the gradual slump towards ultimate moral compromise – played out to an apparent quote from John Ford's The Searchers – is no less gripping for all that. A potential prize winner.