Amat Escalante is the Mexican film-maker who created the brutal and politically engaged crime drama Heli in 2013, for which he won the best director award in Cannes, and in 2016 the deeply strange body horror parable The Untamed which was a prizewinner at Venice. Now, after a stint on the streaming TV drama Narcos: Mexico he has directed and co-written this contorted Lynchian melodrama about Mexico’s corruption, cynicism and indifference, and all the secrets and lies that bloat the country’s ruling classes.
Lost in the Night concerns what may be the corpse of a woman buried in the grounds of a super-rich family and in this respect it rather resembles Robe of Gems from Natalia López Gallardo, who like Escalante has worked with Carlos Reygadas. It’s a weird piece of work: episodic and violent and disparate (though it all hangs together) and flavoured with a mood of simmering erotic discontent, though without the fierce seriousness that was in his earlier films. Escalante may well have originally intended this as a streaming TV series, and it might have worked better that way.
