Robe of Gems review – a startling and unsettling Mexican crime mystery

Natalia Lopez Gallardo's feature debut unfolds with a mix of woozy uncertainty and shock tactics that mirror the murky criminal dealings at its heart

The film that everyone is talking about this year in Berlin is the dazzlingly accomplished and confident debut feature from the 42-year-old Mexican-Bolivian film-maker Natalia Lopez Gallardo; as a former editor, she has worked with Lisandro Alonso and Carlos Reygadas, whose various influences are detectable in the movie's mixture of languour and shock. The title appears to refer to a Buddhist parable about the man who lives in poverty, not knowing that a wealthy friend has securely but invisibly sewn a precious gem into his robe so that he would not have to live like this: the allusion is one of the many opaque and difficult things about this film.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere. Exactly what is going on has to be inferred through the indirect hints and cloudy indications; these are never finally and definitively revealed, and I can't be absolutely sure that this obscurity is not a first-time film-maker's flaw. But Gallardo certainly has a fluent cinematic language at her command.