“Sicario”… In the world of Latin-American drug cartels, the word means professional killer. But the film-maker behind the tense new thriller starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro is a different kind of hitman.
Director Denis Villeneuve may not enjoy the same recognition of a Ridley Scott, Michael Mann or Oliver Stone, but at this point we can safely assume it’s only a matter of time. He’s that good.
The Quebec-born director is on an enviable roll. Sicario is his seventh feature, and each movie has been bigger than the one that preceded it.
Villeneuve’s work has always been striking to look at, but it has grown in authority, depth, and emotional reach without sacrificing the love of storytelling and paradox that made it stand out in the first place.
Sicario and his previous hit, Prisoners, work on a gut level, as thrillers must, but their impact derives from the film-maker’s unease about his protagonists’ actions; scratch this surface tension and the moral ambiguity becomes palpable.
The world – or rather, Hollywood – caught on four years ago, when Villeneuve’s Incendies was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. An ambitious drama about Canadian-Lebanese twins tracking down lost family in the Middle East, the film was slick, surprising, and devastatingly bleak – which may be why it did not win.
Prior to this, Villeneuve had three independent Quebecois films to his credit: the quirky 32 August On Earth (1998), Maelstrom (2002) and Polytechnique (2009), a shattering black-and-white dramatisation of 1989’s “Montreal Massacre”, when a lone gunman murdered 14 women with a rifle at the city’s Ecole Polytechnique.
By the time his sinister, enigmatic José Saramago adaptation Enemy came along in 2014, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a mild history professor thrown for a loop when he encounters his doppelganger, Villeneuve had won the Genie (Canadian Oscar) for best director four times from five features. Only his first film went unrewarded. When Villeneuve also won the lucrative Toronto Film Critics Prize for Enemy, his third TFC win, he generously shared the $100,000 prize money with his fellow nominees.
Released shortly before Enemy, Prisoners was Villeneuve’s first major studio film. This dense, intense thriller features Hugh Jackman as a husband and father who takes the law into his own hands after his daughter is abducted, apparently by a strange, mentally sub-normal young man (Paul Dano) in a campervan.
As dark a film as any by David Fincher, Prisoners doesn’t flinch from disturbing scenes of torture and sadism yet by bringing to life a full range of supporting characters, including Jake Gyllenhaal’s cop, Terrence Howard as Jackman’s neighbour, and their wives, Villeneuve effectively probes the hidden, violent side of the human psyche.
Prisoners was also notable for being the director’s first collaboration with the distinguished British director of photography Roger Deakins, best known for his work with the Coen brothers. Sicario is their second, and if all goes to plan, the hotly anticipated sequel to Blade Runner will be their third. Before that starts shooting next year, Villeneuve will have Story of Your Life in the can, a big-budget sci-fi drama about a linguist recruited to communicate with an extra-terrestrial visitor.
Deakins and Villeneuve seem to bring out the best in each other: Prisoners and Sicario could easily be pro-forma suspense thrillers, but the films have such distinctive textures and atmospheres that they rise above any formula. Every single scene in these films conveys a vivid sense of just what is at stake for the characters.
This is dynamic and dramatic moviemaking that both commands attention and repays it. If Sicario is anything to go by, Blade Runner should be truly out of this world.
