DARK FORCES/ FUEGO NEGRO.

Mexico, 2020, 81 minutes, Colour.
Tenoch Huerta, Erendira Ibarra.
Directed by Bernardo Arellano.


This is a brief thriller/fantasy for audiences who enjoy the weird. Others will want to give it a miss.

A mysterious helmeted bike rider, Franco, stops at a seedy hotel, situated in seedy streets. On the other hand, the audience is given night overviews of the city. It seems that Franco is in search of someone who has disappeared (several flashbacks) and it emerges that it is his sister.

In the hotel there is quite a range of strange characters, quite a gallery. The receptionist looks very polished and organised but offers the guest a selection of escorts. When the water system doesn’t function in his room, a workman, old, one eye destroyed, comes to fix it. And there are some sinister women who give Franco the eye. In particular, the victim of one of her clients, is Rubi, whom Franco rescues. She in fact works as a waitress at a diner and Franco and Rubi’s lives intersect, in real life as well as in his sexual dreams.

He is searching for a psychic girl, an albina, finds her with the sombre woman in charge, asking a vast amount of money for advice for his search – and, there are sequences of her fantasies, her processes, her psychic abilities, and the information she gives – leading Franco to a room full of women who have been rounded up for prostitution, just missing his sister and he goes in search of her.

There is also a strange psychic man who has written a book, Dark Forces, who keeps intervening in Franco’s life as well as in his dreams.

It emerges that he is a renegade hitman, encounters some of his past associates who blame him for loss of trade. Which leads then to some violent confrontations.

This review makes the film less weird than it is while one watches.