Pepe review – inside the beautiful mind of Pablo Escobar’s hippo

Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias is the Dominican film-maker whose 2017 feature debut Cocote I found challenging and intriguing. Now he has created a huge, wayward and weirdly beautiful docu-fictional meditation, which was an event at last year’s Berlin film festival, about the historical consciousness of “Pepe”, one of the hippos kept by Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar on his private estate, but left to roam free with dozens of others when Escobar was killed in 1993. The hippo itself was shot by authorities in the Magdalena river, although many others are still in the wild in Colombia, apparently embarking on the evolutionary journey of acclimatisation in a new habitat created for them by the notorious criminal.

We begin with a kid watching a TV cartoon about a hippo called Pepe (the kid being the son of the German hunter who will later track down the real thing); Arias then shows us Pepe occupying a dreamscape of his own imagining, speaking in a strange multilingual stream of consciousness, wondering at his new situation as he drifts downriver, at liberty but still imprisoned by destiny. Many amazing drone shots depict the world of Pepe’s ancestors in Namibia; Arias also dramatises scenes in post-Escobar Colombia, showing the terrified Colombian fisherman Candelario (Jorge García) who first encounters the monstrously large animal in the river, and for whom this sacred hippo becomes an object of obsession like the Loch Ness monster or Moby-Dick. (His enraged wife Betania (Sor María Ríos) thinks that he is using these tall tales of a river monster to cover up an extra-marital affair.)

Is Pepe – traumatised and alienated – the spirit animal of Colombia or Latin America or even the global south generally? The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

• Pepe is on Mubi from 10 January.