A Mexican mother searches for her son in Fernanda Valadez's haunting debut. Just as Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) finds herself disoriented by unfamiliar situations, she journeys from the world she knows into something more mysterious--and dangerous. As beautiful as the Mexican landscape may be during the day, especially when the sky turns lavender, it's a different story at night (cinematographer Claudia Becerri Bulos captures both modes magnificently).
Magdalena lives in Guanajuato, where Valadez grew up, and she can conjure up images of her son in her memories, but as the film begins, Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) has been gone for two months. He left with his friend, Rigo (Armando García), to find work in Arizona. They traveled by foot and then by bus, but after weeks without any communication, Magdalena and Rigo's mother, Chuya (Laura Elena Ibarra), go to the authorities to report their sons missing only to find that they're two of many mothers trying to locate their sons during a time of widespread lawlessness.
Starting around 2011, cartel members would hijack buses filled with migrant workers to relieve them of their valuables. After that, they would abandon or kill them, while the police would proceed to do very little. They inform Chuya that they have located Rigo's body. Though they have also recovered Jesús's duffel bag, there's no trace of him, so Magdalena holds out hope that he's still alive.
For all of her resourcefulness, though, she can't read and she doesn't have a car or a cell phone. Another mother helps her to read the forms at the police station, while Rigo's father drives her to the border. Then, she's on her own. Convinced that Jesús's bus was hijacked, she sets out to see what she can find. After a series of dead ends, she heads to Ocampo to seek out an indigenous passenger to question him about Jesús, but he only remembers Rigo.
En route, she meets Miguel (David Ilescas), a young man around Jesús's age, who is returning to his mother after deportation from the US. He offers to let her stay at his house, except the eerily quiet town isn't quite the way he remembers it.
The situation only grows more perilous to the extent that it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on. Flashlights provide brief moments of illumination, but for the most part, Magdalena ends up lost in a darkness that's as figurative as it is literal. In the end, though, she finds out what happened to her son. She couldn't have known in advance, but the conclusion suggests that some mysteries are better left unsolved.
Fortunately, Valadez and cowriter Astrid Rondero always treat her with respect, and Hernandez, who has a kindly affect, plays Magdalena as something other than a saint or a hero. She's just a mother looking for answers. If the filmmakers have built their movie around one Mexican mother, she stands for countless others who have found themselves in similar straits. Recommended.