Building toward inevitable tragedy and inescapable violence, Robe of Gems is a slow burn without any interest in easy audience satisfaction or mercy. That sometimes comes at the cost of the film’s sense of forward motion, which is the stuff of patient deliberation, but its bursts of savagery are unrelenting in their shock value all the same. Writer/director Natalia López Gallardo’s feature directorial debut exists in a liminal space between clenched-jaw thriller and slice-of-life character study, set within a vision of Mexico so overrun by corruption from the top down that the depictions of it here are of casual, broad and bland conversations. The result is often terrifying, even as the thriller-narrative aspects are fairly predictable.
We can more or less guess what will happen in this plot as it goes along, following a trio of characters whose fates intertwine in ways none of them can guess. The first is Isabel (Nailea Norvind), whose marriage has fallen apart and driven her and her two children (Sherlyn Zavala and Balam Toledo) to the countryside villa belonging to her mother. There they are reunited with the film’s second important character, the family housekeeper and maid Maria (Antonia Olivares), whose sister has gone missing alongside so many disappearing innocents. Isabel promises to look for the woman, which obviously must involve the local police chief (Eugenia Salazar), the third major character here.
The chief is primarily interested in protecting her son (Juan Daniel García Treviño) from falling into the very criminal organization suspected of kidnapping Maria’s sister. The further into the rabbit hole each of these characters travels, the more violent and gruesome and ruthless this closed world reveals itself to be. That does mean a certain degree of predictability once all the pieces start falling into place and it becomes clear that no one is safe from the machinations of López Gallardo’s intentions. Yes, there are shocking and gutting deaths, because of course there must be. Where the film draws its cumulative power is the sense of discovery within these characters’ perspectives, as well as within the establishment of such a grungy, murky morass of amorality.
The performances are as frightening in their stillness, stoicism and naturalism as the surrounding action. Norvind is wrenching a woman whose psyche fractures as trauma descends upon her. Olivares is great as the desperate mother whose journey leads down such impossible-to-fathom avenues, and Salazar is, at first, threatening and, upon the arrival of a certain futility, utterly pathetic as the corrupt chief of police whose priority is her own survival above nearly everything else.
In contrast to the starkness and the brutality, López Gallardo and cinematographer Adrian Durazo capture every action in the daylight with a hazy, almost idyllic loveliness, as if no one can really tell that the world they inhabit is an ugly one, built on sadistic opportunism. In return, the contrast to that is how the nighttime scenes verge on total, suffocating blackness, which makes one violent act of self-preservation all the more terrifying. Robe of Gems is an unusual and provocative title for a quiet thriller in which the tension is all in the terrified faces of these characters, and in what inspires that terror.
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