Lush foliage paves the frames of Mexican director Yulene Olaizola’s entrancing feature “Tragic Jungle.” Backdrop to violence and the supernatural, the eponymous ecosystem traps us in its mystifying maw for an alluring adventure centered on Black and Indigenous characters—an infrequent sight in the country’s filmic output.
Played by first-time Belizean actress Indira Rubie Andrewin, Agnes is a young woman crossing the Hondo River to escape a much older English cacique she’s expected to marry. Through voiceover narration in the Yucatec Maya language, Jacinto (Mariano Tun Xool), the wisest man among the pack she will soon meet, warns of the jungle’s deceitful ways and a dangerous female entity known as the Xtabay. Hidden amid the rich greenery may be everyone’s demise.
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Rarely seen on screen, Mexico’s southern border, specifically that with Belize, still a colony known as British Honduras in 1920 when the movie takes place; flaunts its raw beauty for Colombian cinematographer Sofía Oggioni (“La Sirga”). To help cast a spell on the viewer, she enriches the sumptuous setting with lighting choices that range from the sheer naturalistic to the seductive eeriness of softly illuminated night scenes.
Agnes survives a confrontation with her unwanted suitor and makes it, just barely, to the Mexican side. It’s there that an otherworldly force usurps her sexual awakening, just before a group of Mexican men who collect gum from the trees in the area capture her. Likewise, Andrewin’s restrained performance commences a shift from timid fugitive to the sultry object of desire with a penetrating gaze. Agnes is in absolute control, even if the men that surround her erroneously think otherwise. In her new form, Olaizola’s leading lady weaponizes the men’s greed, impulses, and fantasies to cleanse the land.
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As an English speaker, Agnes is unable to verbally communicate, but that doesn’t stop the workers’ leader Ausencio (Gilberto Barraza) from lust after her. With the exception of the aforementioned Jacinto and the pragmatic Caimán (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, also in this year’s “Fauna”), the men begin to behave like predatory beasts. The actors, several of them debuting here, comprise an eclectic ensemble with its weakest links (Ausencio’s ill brother-in-law who’s become a burden) and agreeable veterans like Mundo (Eligio Meléndez). Used to the inhospitable terrain, death and killing don’t faze them.
Nearing the movie’s final strokes, the action ramps up. When Mexican gum laborers discover the white Englishman—who is after Agnes—and his crew are also profiting from the raw material, the objective shifts. It’s now them who want to cross the river to the other side. Economical yet stellar, the project takes advantage of the region and brings in key production design elements and stunts to realize a minimalist epic.
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Olaizola’s story exists at the crossroads of race, language, and belief by harnessing the cultures that intersect at this precise geographical location. Expedition movies like Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” or the more recent “The Lost City of Z” from James Gray might echo in one’s mind while watching “Tragic Jungle” even if they differ in scope and outlook. But even more so the hyper-sensorial approach to the sounds and imagery of nature of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’ “Tropical Malady” or even last year’s “Monos” from Alejandro Landes.
The notion of a mystical wilderness, where not everything that exists can be seen yet their effects are perceived in our physical plane, concerns the director and manifests across the building blocks of the audiovisual work. Alejandro Otaola’s ominous electronic score primes our senses with subtle but ever-present tension, which contrasts with the ear-piercing, guttural cries of the black howler monkeys or saraguatos in the region. At every turn, the jungle and its creatures, imposing crocodiles and jaguars included, seem invested in haunting the visitors and partake in the Xtabay’s intentions.
Conceptually, the film hits all its marks impeccably. From being fateful to the Yucatec lure that describes the Xtabay as a woman wearing a white dress and sporting long black, to the unnerving feeling it instills in us the deeper we venture in it. Yet, Olaizola decidedly conceived a historical plot that facilitates and justifies these interests cohesively, but with much less regard for writing fuller protagonists. All of them lack a story and motivation beyond the confines of the tropical environment that brings them together. It’s more about the “what” and the “how” than the “who” and the “why.”
Nevertheless, as a period piece tapping into an underexplored subject with a riveting angle and truly breathtaking vistas, “Tragic Jungle” consistently amazes. It’s a gritty fable about borders: the one that separates two countries with distinct identities, the blurring frontier between the physical and the spiritual, and the divide that must exist between our voracious illusions of progress and untainted nature. Trespassing any of these limits carries grave consequences ripe for captivating cinema in the proper hands. That’s indisputably the case here. [A-]
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