‘Morro’ Biarritz Review: A Tale Of Grief And Healing Finds Tenderness At The Edges Of Mexico’s Drug War

Dramas about small Mexican towns under cartel control number in the dozens. Most are defined by their violence and by characters marching toward an inevitable fate, one way or another. Morro doesn’t fully escape that world, but it keeps its eye on the margins of the action, leaving the violence that does exist off screen, and looks for something like a glimmer of hope amid a bleak landscape. It may not be enough to shake off the atmosphere of rawness and unease that hangs over these settings, but it works, at the very least, as a small emotional balm.

Our protagonist is Mateo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), a veterinarian in a region whose control is disputed by two rival drug gangs. He lives in a modest house surrounded by animals, leading a secluded and mostly silent life since the death of his son, a loss tied to the violent environment around them. One night, a group of narcos turns up unannounced with a badly wounded dog, the Morro of the title. They tell him it belongs to a boss in their outfit and order him to save it. Mateo does, removing a bullet from the animal’s body. The men want to take the dog back, but Morro is too fragile to travel, so they leave Mateo a cell phone and tell him to call when the dog is well enough.

From there, the film traces the animal’s recovery, with very few words and a great deal of detail. Under Mateo’s care, Morro slowly regains strength and begins moving normally around the ranch, among the rabbits and chickens the man keeps. For Mateo, the dog’s company becomes a way of escaping, if only a little, the loneliness and depression that seem to surround him.

As the dog improves and the bond between the two grows, the film also introduces another young man, Poncho, and his girlfriend Isabel (Ernesto Meléndez and Anna Diaz, the latter recently seen in Ceniza en la boca), whose connection to the central story is revealed gradually as the minutes go by. At some point, the conflict between the gangs will literally knock on Mateo’s door once again, and he will have to find a way to come out of it unscathed, both himself and the dog.

Morro is a simple, humanist film, and its most striking element is the absence of dialogue for much of its running time. In his second feature, García Saiz proves to be a filmmaker who trusts the power of images and of storytelling through them alone, and he does so with remarkable skill. Sánchez Parra, the Amores perros actor, supplies the rest, using an enviable economy of means to convey his character’s suffering and his slow shift toward a somewhat more hopeful view of his own life.

Of course, the possibility of salvation through his bond with the dog does nothing to stop violence and death from running through the town. In that sense, Morro doesn’t depart from the norm for this kind of narco story. The difference lies, more than anything, in what it chooses to film, what it leaves out of frame, and where it puts its focus. The relationship between Mateo and Morro won’t change the tragedy surrounding the place where they live, but it will at least give him, in the midst of the darkness, a reason to keep going.