TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID
15 FILM EXTRAS
OUT 23 AUGUST DVD, BD, DIGITAL HD EXTRAS Commentary, Making of, Deleted scenes, Casting sessions
The dead won’t rest, graffiti animals live, wishes can be curses, and harsh experience is just a shot away from innocence. Faint echoes of famous fan Guillermo del Toro’s work aside, Issa López’s magicalrealist horror establishes a searing identity of its own in the haunted hinterlands between states, where fantasy and cruel reality coexist – often lethally.
After opening titles that tot up the human costs of Mexico’s drug wars, that coexistence is violently established as gunfire disrupts a children’s class. Soon after, young Estrella (Paola Lara) finds herself orphaned and in the fractious company of four lost boys, trailed by an oddly purposeful line of blood and a whispering army of the dead: an army hungry to confront the gangs and corrupt politicos behind their suffering.
Literary and arthouse references range from Peter Pan to The Spirit Of The
Beehive, but you don’t need to get them to get it. López balances spot-on child casting, fertile images and outré flourishes with intuitive precision, setting them against vividly lived-in worlds filtered through a traumatised child’s perspective. Sometimes horrifying, often heart-breaking and always wholly assured, the result weds horror-fantasy to social allegory with great poetic concision, urgency and empathy. Once it has you caught in its spell, Tigers doesn’t let go. Kevin Harley