EIFF film review: Days of Grace

THERE’S something thrillingly unhinged about Days of Grace, a full-tilt Mexican crime epic about a trio of kidnappings that takes place against the back-drop of three successive World Cups.

Tenoch Huerta plays the 'whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-job-done' cop. Picture: Getty

Very much of a piece with Brazilian exploitation flicks such as the Elite Squad movies, co-writer/director Everardo Gout’s debut feature serves up a barrage of bullets and bloodshed in the barrios of Mexico City, upping the ante with crazy surveillance-style camera work that puts us viscerally in the moment with its characters to give us a trench-eye view of the random urban warfare being unleashed on a daily basis.

The film’s main innovation is its purposefully confusing structure, which uses references to the unfurling 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cup finals to signify the differing timelines of three interconnected stories, all linked by the increasingly frenzied efforts of a whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-job-done cop (Tenoch Huerta) as he attempts to dispense justice in a world overrun with criminality and corruption.

This makes Days of Grace tricky as hell to follow, but Gout cleverly uses the unpredictability of the sporting action as a guideline for his own tripartite narrative, ensuring that the story remains highly volatile at all times. Particularly good is the way he uses the camera to disorientate. Whether he’s blurring shots to replicate the sensorial overload of a kidnap victim as he’s beaten to a pulp, or mimicking the caught-on-the-fly style of a modern news cameraman to track a firefight between cops and criminals as it erupts on busy streets in broad daylight, Gout isn’t afraid to push his frenzied aesthetic as far as it will go. That comes at the expense of any deep and meaningful insights, but that’s okay: this is genre filmmaking taken to its pulpiest extreme, an example of style over substance to be sure, but what style.

Rating: * * * *