This is a story of ignorance and helplessness. It carries a distinctive docufiction quality, while blurring the lines between what happens inside and outside the frame. It is often what you don’t see that speaks louder.
The movie begins with the immediate loss of innocence. What happens when a crime not only occurs in front of your eyes, carried out by the very authority intended to protect you? There is no transition, no processed grief. Just a young man forced to understand that growing up, in certain contexts, is not a process but an immediate requirement – that the monster is not an external entity capable of destroying us, but rather the Latin American socio-economic context itself. Institutional silence is capable of making people disappear, and imprisoning those inconvenient citizens without due process.
It is from this lack of understanding that Lucas (Salvador de la Garza) lives his daily life in a narcoleptic state. The visuals are beautifully multilayered, representing substance abuse under precarious conditions. This device isn’t merely symbolic. Lucas drags his entire existence along with his burdensome body. Grief is double: he lost a loved one, and he feels that he may have failed friend and potential romance Alex (Alexandra Cueto). Nothing makes sense now: neither work nor conversations with his brother. It feels like he’s treading the line between the real and the imaginary.
The escape is forceful and the hallucinatory visuals constructed with determination. But Mostro isn’t just a trippy movie. It successfully illustrates how a tragic event can disconnect someone from reality. Lucas hides from the police, babbles senselessly and listens to a friend’s voice on the answering machine to no avail. The experiences of our protagonist transcend the coming-of-age tropes. They reveal that the institutions often fail often fails young Mexicans. Instead, it devours them.
Mostro originally premiered at the 74th Locarno Film Festival. The German premiere takes place at Kino Babylon of Berlin on Saturday, March 21st (2026), followed by a small circuit season.