Sicario is deeply unsettling in a way that few films are. A grisly crime thriller where most of the violence occurs just off-camera, it’s driven more by atmosphere than story, and its tone is implacable and hypnotic. It’s a two-hour dreamfilm — nay, a nightmare film — where logic is irrelevant, where everyone but the main character is sociopathic, where death’s scythe lingers over every encounter. All of it is shot through with the orchestral poetry of Terence Malick or Scorsese at his Taxi Driver peak, painting a vision of a covert apocalypse submerged in moral decay.
The setting is the border between the U.S. and Mexico, but it might as well be Mars or Europa. Scored to the masterfully ominous drones of minimalist composer Johann Johannson, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve shows that familiar terrain like it’s an alien land — vast, arid, usually depopulated, a spatial morass of off-the-grid lawlessness. While most directors, concerned with propelling the plot forever forward, wouldn’t stop to observe the landscape beyond a perfunctory establishing shot, Villeneuve’s lengthy, wordless montages catalog his otherworldly vistas from above, his camera gliding over the land — like a drone, a UFO, a judgmental god.
It’s a region that is as close to Hell on Earth as I’ve seen conjured by a camera, and it’s no place for an idealistic innocent like Kate Macer (Emily Blunt). A member of the FBI’s Kidnap Response Team with no background in narcotics, Kate is nonetheless hand-selected to accompany a quasi-legal drug task force led by “DOD advisor” Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and a freelance Mexican sharpshooter (Benicio del Toro) who speaks in cryptic declarations. “Nothing will make sense to your American ears,” he tells Kate, and it’s the most honest line in the film.
Their mission, approached through corruption, obfuscation and torture, is the apprehension of a drug cartel’s jefe, and the action commences on borders both physical and nebulous — between El Paso and San Juan, between legality and illegality, between truth and lies. Villeneuve, whose 2013 policier Prisoners presented a bleak world where heroes and villains beat with the same heart of darkness, brings a similar ambiguity to Sicario (the title is Spanish for “hitman,” by the way), unequivocally condemning violence from both sides as their dividing lines blur.
Clad in undistinguished T-shirts and the kind of makeup that doesn’t look like makeup, Blunt is the astonishing Virgil for the viewer’s infernal descent, her face a roadmap of fear, pain, confusion and ineffectual rage toward an unbeatable system. Del Toro was clearly hired to speak softly and carry a big stick, and he could play this role in his sleep, but Blunt’s is the breakthrough performance here, a master class in often-wordless engagement. She’s Dreyer’s Joan of Arc and Bresson’s Balthazar updated for the modern drug war, absorbing the sins and sufferings of a cruel world.
SICARIO. Cast: Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jon Bernthal, Daniel Kaluuya; Director: Denis Villeneuve; Distributor: Lionsgate; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters