Content warning: This article mentions violence, suicide, feminicide, transphobia, misogyny, and antisemitism.

In the found-footage style movie Barrio Triste, Colombian-American director Stillz provides us with an intimate look at a gang of teenage boys from a Medellín, Colombia barrio triste or sad neighbourhood. Torn-down, half-built cement houses, narrow passages, broken lights, unpaved roads, animals, blood, graffiti, and gothic/punk sensibilities litter the streets of the film. TIFF’s International Programmer, Latin America, Spain and Portugal Diana Cadavid, described the film as “trippy, strangely poetic” and a “portrait of violence and loneliness,” on the film’s TIFF page. 

Barrio Triste certainly is that; however, the violence takes a back seat to the disaffection apparent in the lives of the teen boys, where mourning, horror, and ritual coalesce into the low-fi static of a teenager’s stolen handheld TV camera. 

Upon hearing that the film was directed by Bad Bunny collaborator and music video director Stillz of “Baticano,” “Yo Visto Así,” and my personal favourite, “Yo Perreo Sola,” with the film’s music direction from the electronic/experimental artist ARCA, I was immediately sold. 

The film is executively produced by Harmony Korine, of Kids fame. I expected Korine’s shock-jockey stylings to play a role in the feel of the film, as suggested in the name of his production company behind Barrio Triste, ‘EDGLRD.’ However, as Cadavid notes, the film “steer[s] clear of exploitation.” Perhaps, thankfully so. 

When thinking about representations of Latin American gang violence, exploitationist and sensationalist North American media warn us of beheadings, disembowellings, and stacks of cocaine. These tropes support American interventionism and the ever-continuing ‘war on drugs.’ In contrast, the film also steers clear of another trope about Latin America, of sharp, slick, bright reggaeton — as we find in many Stillz-directed music videos.

As a result, we can see why IndieWire Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio describes the film in an online review as meandering. We miss the ultraviolence and utter nihilism of exploitation — though there is one disembowelment! Instead, we are given close-ups of a pet rabbit, a mother stripping sugar cane — while she tells the camera of the warnings she gives her son against staying out at night, and multiple close-ups of make-shift religious shrines mourning murdered and kidnapped young men. 

The violences of daily life are seen in smaller vignettes throughout the film. As we follow the eye of one kid who holds the camera stolen from a TV news crew, we see another kid trying to take his life by jumping in front of a motorcycle, a group of buzzcut-shaved boys piled on a couch watching static on a TV, and we stare with the protagonist into a broken, flickering streetlight. 

We consistently come face-to-face with childhood innocence transformed into violent disaffection. As the director said in a Variety interview about his inspiration for the film, “When I was growing up, I heard a lot of stories in my family from Colombia about kidnappings and things like that. I think [Barrio Triste is] a way of me visualizing what that felt like as a kid hearing those stories.” 

The childlike point of view plays into the storytelling as well, where the struggle between good and evil is represented through the camera as extraterrestrial-like angels and demons who provide a backdrop to the motivations of teenage boys. 

Where the film lacks, however, is in its consistent disaffection. The flickers of hope, long gazes into blinding light, noise-engulfing sound, do not linger enough for meaning. 

As the boys drive down to the site of their first ultraviolence, we hear on the car radio an interview with a serial killer. In this interview, the serial killer talks about murdering sex workers, how he does it, and what he does with their bodies. He also talks about harming animals, and the shock at discovering that the woman he was going to kill had a ‘package.’ 

Near the end, we return to the serial killer, and specifically the murder of women, with graffiti-lined walls depicting the acts described in the initial interview. As we follow the camera through a claustrophobic staircase, we see the naively drawn, almost childish, stick figures of beheaded women with exaggerated breasts. It may be drawn by the serial killer himself or by the boys. The killer is depicted with an engorged penis, devil horns, and surrounded by the occasional swastika. 

The graffiti speaks to a Latin American machismo taken to its furthest degree as consumed and reproduced by children and teens. Yet, the film fails to truly confront the realities of feminicide in Latin America. The tension and horror of the scene is deflated by a jumpscare courtesy of teen boy Calambre. 

As Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos writes in the preface to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in Latin America, “Feminicide is genocide against women, and it occurs when the historical conditions generate social practices that allow for violent attempts against the integrity, health, liberties, and lives of girls and women.” 

In Latin America, we have seen how the reality of feminicide has sparked social movements like Ni Una Menos and greater concerns for transfeminicide to hold governments and communities accountable. 

Barrio Triste merely touches on these issues. The occasional lingering gaze on fearful women dressing up a kid for her first communion, the radio program, the graffiti. The only hope that seeps through the disaffected violence comes solely through the mourning of boyhood. But perhaps that’s more honest, through the eyes of our boys, Juan, Calambre, Pocillo — and Stillz.

I personally also wanted more nihilism, ultra-violence, or even schlocky bromance; the movie did not give it to me. We are given a taste at the beginning, but as quick as the ultra-violence happens, as quickly as any boyhood bonding shown through the splashes of a pool, or the sausage-link bowels of a sacrificed boy surrounded by pig’s blood, a machete dance à la Star Wars Kid, or the invitation for the suicidal boy to join the gang, we return to the meandering movement of the camera. 

The movie camera’s static, which remains on screen throughout the whole film, parallels the constellations of a dark, cosmic, mostly empty galaxy, with only distant stars as flickers of light.