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Some movies wound us so profoundly that once darkness has consumed their final frame we are incapable of shaking off the heartache. That’s the power of
Identifying Features,
as
painfully intimate as it is unsparing in its indictment of a country ravaged by a corrosive, entrenched evil. Making her feature debut, Mexican writer-director Fernanda Valadez finds a personal tragedy within a national one the murder or disappearance of thousands of people, the mass collateral damage of the ongoing drug war. She’s made a humanitarian lament by way of a slow-burn thriller.
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Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), from Guanajuato, travels north to the border in search of her underage son, Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela). Two months earlier, he agreed to migrate to the U.S. with his best friend, Rigo (Armando García), in hopes of overcoming their adverse economic circumstances. In that time, no news of the boys’ whereabouts has arrived. In a sobering opening scene that set