Sujo review – Mexican coming-of-age drama in the shadow of a cartel killing

Here is a Mexican crime drama without the crime – or without much of it, taking place chiefly on the margins of serious violence. It is the coming-of-age story of a teenage boy whose dad was a sicario, or cartel killer, in the Tierra Caliente of Michoacán in southern Mexico. Young Sujo (Kevin Aguilar) is at primary school when his father is brutally killed and the killers come looking for the little boy, fearing he will grow up to avenge his dad’s death. Sujo takes refuge at the remote shack belonging to his watchful aunt Nemesia (Yadira Pérez); she becomes his protective family, along with his other aunt Rosalia (Karla Garrido) and his cousins Jai (Alexis Varela) and Jeremy (Jairo Hernandez). Sujo grows to be a teenager (played by Juan Jesús Varela), and flirts with the idea of being a drug runner along with Jai and Jeremy, using his dad’s old car; or alternatively going straight for a new life in Mexico City, working, enrolling in school to study literature and striking out for a radically alternative existence.

Film-makers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez first made their name with the engrossing docu-realist drama Identifying Features with Valadez directing and co-writing with Rondero; it was a heartbreaking story of a mother’s desolate yearning for her absent son. This, with the pair now credited together as directors, has many of the same ideas and images, although it is not as angry and fiercely coiled as Identifying Features, and Sujo’s possible life as a student is not plausibly imagined as the grimly banal world of violence whose gravitational force pulls at him constantly.

As for his name, its meaning is elusive throughout the film (Nemesia points out her own means “vengeance”) until the end which returns us to the moment of his father’s own ironically innocent childhood that began the film. A strongly intended and conceived film, but without the passion of the earlier work.

• Sujo is in UK cinemas from 13 December.