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Cult Review
Archivist John
Senior Editor
Santiago Sierra’s Barranca trágica is not a film you watch; it is a wound you cauterize with your own gaze. Imagine the DNA of The Running Fight spliced into the marrow of Satan’s Private Door, then left to rot inside the copper belly of a mountain until it births something that smells of kerosene and mother's milk.
The mother’s body—played with uncanny stillness by María Luisa Carvajal—functions like a palimpsest: every layer peeled back reveals another text written in bile and bureaucracy. Notice how Sierra refuses close-ups for the first 38 minutes; we see her only as a lumpy silhouette, a geological event. When the camera finally glides inside the tarp, it’s not reveal but desecration: her face caked with calcite, eyelashes threaded with barbed wire, mouth agape as if mid-sentence. The effect is less horror than archaeology—we are not meant to scream, but to inventory.
Santiago Sierra (who also writes) casts himself as the miner Odín, a man whose cheekbones look carved by pickaxe. Opposite him, Jose Flores Alatorre’s Fausto is all elbows and irony, a gravedigger who whistles La Llorona in syncopated jazz. Their chemistry crackles like faulty wiring: one believes earth is a vault to be cracked, the other thinks it’s a mouth that must be fed. Their duality rhymes with the twin protagonists of En Søns Kærlighed, yet where that Nordic tragedy sought reconciliation, Barranca trágica opts for mineral entropy.
DP Elena Natalie Castro shoots on 16 mm stock left to bake in a Sonoran shed for six weeks. The emulsion reticulates; the grain swells like infected lymph nodes. Day-for-night sequences are painted by hand with turmeric and tobacco juice, giving moonlight the color of bruised mangoes. In one bravura take, the camera follows a tarantula across the corpse’s collarbone while the brothers argue about inheritance tax; the arachnid’s legs leave phantom trails that linger for twenty frames—an ectoplasmic ledger of unpaid debts.
Sound designer Elena Sánchez Valenzuela eschews score entirely. Instead she buries contact mics inside limestone fissures, capturing tectonic sighs that she later pitch-shifts into whale-bleat laments. The result feels like eavesdropping on a continent confessing to genocide. Listen for the moment when Fausto’s shovel scrapes flint; the resonance blooms into a minor seventh chord that dissipates as quickly as hope. It’s the same chord that closes Revelj, suggesting a secret musical lexicon across Sierra’s filmography.
Elena Sánchez Valenzuela doubles as the telegraphist whose belly throbs like a second mouth. She taps Morse on a rusted rail spike, her dots and dashes subtitled not as words but as Aztec glyphs. Mid-film she goes into labor; the contractions sync with rockslides, each push loosens a slab of cliff. The newborn emerges smeared with ochre, looking eerily like the clay figurines tourists unearth in the opening montage. Sierra refuses to show whether the child breathes; we cut to black, then to a shot of the canyon at dawn, now missing a chunk of its profile as though geology itself had given birth.
American treasure hunters arrive armed with ground-penetrating radar and colonial entitlement. Their leader, a Silicon Valley burnout wearing a Maga hat re-stitched to read MAGMA, offers Fausto a drone in exchange for the corpse’s teeth. The scene plays like Atop of the World in Motion meets The King’s Game—capitalist extraction framed as spiritual safari. Watch how Sierra blocks them in symmetrical wide shots, their pastel sportswear popping against the canyon’s hemorrhaged reds, a living David Salle canvas indicting Manifest Destiny 2.0.
The priest (a cameo by the director’s father) arrives carrying a suitcase lined with mercury vials—quicksilver being the colonial method to extract silver from ore. He offers Odín communion: a wafer dipped in mercury. The sacrament scene is shot in macro; the metal beads roll across the tongue like miniature moons, then coalesce into a mirror that reflects the miner’s open mouth. For a second we see infinity inside a cavity—faith as amalgam, salvation as toxicity. It’s the inverse of Nurse Cavell where religion provides moral ballast; here it accelerates corrosion.
Midway, the film fractures chronology. We jump to 1994: the same canyon, now flooded by a dam project. The brothers—played by the same actors, aged via latex that looks more geological than human—row across the reservoir in search of their mother’s bones. Water has replaced stone, but the thirst remains. This temporal whiplash recalls Secret Love yet eschews melodrama for a paleontological chill. When Odín dives, the water turns viscous, amber-like; he surfaces clutching not bone but a USB drive containing drone footage of the original trek. Time folds; history becomes data.
The resurrection—if we dare call it that—arrives without fanfare. The corpse sits up, bees dribbling from her mouth like black honey. She laughs: a sound layered with 96 kHz recordings of tectonic plates scraping. The canyon walls crack along pre-Columbian petroglyphs; the fissures emit a dust that hangs in the air like inverted snow. Critics compare it to the earthquake finale of Skottet, but Sierra’s aim is not catharsis—it’s cartography. He maps the exact instant when personal grief mutates into geopolitical rupture.
Notice the film’s chromatic arc: rust → turmeric → mercury → ochre → anthracite. Each hue corresponds to a stage of resource extraction. The yellows of turmeric, associated with the telegraphist’s Morse, evoke the golden dreams that lured Spanish conquistadors; the silvery whites of mercury mirror transnational mining conglomerates still active in the region. By the time the palette reaches anthracite, the screen is nearly monochrome, as though the very spectrum has been mined to depletion. It’s a visual thesis more damning than any manifesto.
Classical narrative dictates a third-act confrontation; Sierra provides absence. After the mother’s laugh, the brothers vanish. We get an 11-minute static shot of the emptied tarp, wind inflating it like a ghost trying to remember weight. The only movement: a beetle dragging a flake of gold across the fabric, its trajectory forming the spiral glyph seen earlier on the telegraphist’s belly. The scene is either maddening or transcendent—your threshold for negative space will decide. I found myself counting breaths, realizing I’d been holding mine since the mercury communion.
The film exists in a legal limbo: Sierra rejected distribution offers from Amazon and Netflix, citing “capitalist necrophilia.” Instead he struck a 16 mm print that tours autonomous cinemas and squats. Check the Cine Autónomo map for pop-up screenings in Oaxaca, Tijuana, or East L.A. If you’re landlocked, a 4K telecine circulates on BitTorrent under the name Barranca_tragica_2024_4K_HEVC_es-en. Seed 1:1 ratio minimum; Sierra embedded a crypto hash that rewards seeders with NFT fragments of the mercury-wafer scene—sell at your own moral peril.
Barranca trágica is the rare film that alters your physical chemistry. I left the screening dehydrated, as though my body had donated moisture to the canyon. Days later I tasted rust in coffee, heard Morse in radiator clicks. Sierra has not just directed; he’s prospected a new vein of cinematic ore, one where narrative is waste rock and emotion is the precious metal you’ll never fully extract. Compare it to The Coiners’ Game or Der Lumpenbaron and you’ll miss the point—this is cinema as geological event, a landslide that buries the very concept of critique. I can only attest: I was there, I tasted mercury, and I am not the same.
Rating: 9.7/10 — the 0.3 deducted because even entropy deserves a flaw.
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