Movie Review: Sicario

In his last two films Denis Villenueve, the director of Sicario, has developed a fascination with the limits of luminescence. In Prisoners, Villenueve's last film (while Enemy was released after Prisoners it was actually made first), a search party combs the woods at night, looking for two missing girls. Filmed from above the light of their flashlights forms small circles with discrete borders. In Villenueve's world light doesn't taper off into darkness, it slams into it like a brick wall. The search for knowledge in this world is always curtailed by the hard limits of the unknowable.

This fascination comes to the fore again in Sicario. Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, an FBI SWAT officer assigned to an extra-judicial extraction team led by Josh Brolin's Matt Graver. Out of her element as a law-and-order agent in a world where such terms are not only meaningless, but are actively farcical, Kate is told over and over again that the system of rules she relies upon to understand the world do not apply to her current assignment. "The boundaries have shifted," her FBI mentor tells her. "Watch and maybe learn something," says Josh Brolin. Throughout the film identities and loyalties are unclear, attempts to build a case through the accumulation of facts are dismissed as facile, and the only clarity comes through the execution of violence.

Shot by Roger Deakins, whose work on films like Jarhead, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit illustrates that he has learned the lessons of John Ford, Sicario explores vast, open spaces, and lingers on the antiseptic purity and deep ambivalence of the desert in a way that calls to mind von Stroheim's Greed. It is fantastic to look at. The score by Johann Johannsson is resonant and haunting, like the best possible version of the score of a Christopher Nolan movie.

The performances, especially those of Emily Blunt and Benicio del Toro, are phenomenal. Del Toro in particular is, perhaps, as good as he has ever been. It is a towering performance that is profoundly affecting. To say too much more would be to dilute the remarkable sense of tension that the film builds over the course of its two hour run time.

Leaving the theater I felt something like what I felt like leaving Mad Max: Fury Road, but for different reasons. Fury Road was a profound sensory experience. While Sicario plays on the senses, the real power of the film lies in the continually mounting sense of uncertainty and anxiety that left me feeling tight through the chest and clutching the arm rests of my seat. Without a doubt this is one of the best films of the year.

Rating: 4/4