Were the definition of performance taken a bit more liberally, the titular veiled hit man of Gianfranco Rosi's El Sicario: Room 164 might very well give Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Gary Oldman a run for their collective money. Unnamed and shrouded by layers of black cloth, the hit man is the lone figure that appears on screen throughout Rosi's brisk and breathless documentary, and really there is not much need for anything else. Describing some twenty years as a torturer, murderer, and agent of the Mexican cartels in Ciudad Juarez, Rosi's subject lays out the most riveting border thriller ever put to film; a lifetime indebted to tremendous evils ordered by men of unspeakable power and rampant cash flow.
The hit man begins with recruitment, detailing a process that's frighteningly close to a widespread, more ambitious version of Matt Damon's storyline in The Departed. The way he describes how the cartels infiltrate the police academies and use them as training grounds for their agents -- to learn how to trail people, shoot professionally, disguise themselves and interrogate suspects, amongst other things -- is riveting and chilling. Bucking ego and morality, the picture Rosi and his subject paint is that of a country that not only accepts corruption as a ubiquitous force in government and the police force but also relies on the capital it produces to power its workforce and the country's economy.
From there, the film's namesake spills out stories of heinous torture (women and men burned and boiled alive), kidnapping and executions. Bt almost as interesting are the particulars of how the cartel communicates and sets orders. One of the more haunting moments is when the subject discusses his displeasure with the torture and killing of young women who speak out of school or, in the eyes of the cartel, get too ambitious. He even goes so far as to describe the difference between strangling and shooting a target, as well as the difference between a professional hit and an amateur bullet spray, but the way he speaks never intonates a belated sense of moral wrong or genuine regret. He might as well be speaking about a job at a butcher's shop.Indeed, not for nothing does the black veil and wardrobe give off the sense that you're watching a 60 Minutes interview with Death himself. Only on occasion does Rosi cut away to a still image of a dilapidated home, a landscape view of Mexico, a hotel room door or a short ride behind a police car, images that, as the film goes on, increasingly suggest a calm, quiet veneer hiding unfathomable horrors and loss so great that it can be barely spoken about. This is further mirrored in a notebook that the hit man draws and writes in as he explains his deeds. Numbers, shapes, and simple figures are here representative of wholesale slaughter, moral decay, and the buying and selling of unspeakable influence. One might take these Sharpie markings as a representation of those narrative films that attempt to describe and detail the realities of this lone figure's everyday existence.
Only in speaking of his moment of redemption does Rosi's subject's remorse come into glaring relief, as he describes being overwhelmed while worshipping in a church attended by hundreds of men praying hysterically. It is a moment of substantial, stunning emotional potency, as is Rosi's film as a whole; in terms of the year in non-fiction filmmaking, only Steve James's harrowing The Interrupters might match its volcanic power. Rosi's film also anticipates one of the great films of 2012, Gerardo Naranjo's unyieldingly venomous Miss Bala, but though it speaks of reminiscent terror, El Sicario: Room 164 stands on its own as a vital document in the battle for Mexico's soul. Lending nuance and huge personal weight to the argument, Rosi's film lifts the very same veil behind which its subject is doomed to forever live.
