Fauna

A playful artist of the switch-up, Mexico-born filmmaker Nicolás Pereda creates shifting, often elusive fictions with a recurring troupe of actors. In his nimble new film, an actress Luisa (Luisa Pardo) brings home her affable boyfriend Paco (Francisco Barreiro) to see her family, but they cross paths with her standoffish brother Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez). For a while, a tense but increasingly funny comedy of manners and machismo unfolds as her father (Jose Rodriguez Lopez) enters the picture: in one beguiling and funny set piece, dad asks hapless boyfriend to reprise his small role from a TV drugs trade dram on the spot. (Barreiro, a Pereda regular like his co-stars, indeed acted in the show NARCOS: MEXICO.) Meanwhile, Luisa rehearses amusingly loaded dialogue with her long-sufering mom (Teresita Sánchez). But then a new world of fictions is born when the film spins off into a trickier story relating to a disappearance, which just so happens to star all the same actors (with the help of a wig or two). Staging much of the unpredictable action in nondescript and deserted locales, Pereda allows the strains of menace and even violence that can shadow ordinary life in Mexico to seep into his film. (Nicolas Rapold)

Nicolás Pereda: WHERE ARE THEIR STORIES? (2007), JUNTOS (2009), PERPETUUM MOBILE (2009), TODO, EN FIN, EL SILENCIO LO OCUPABA (2010), SUMMER OF GOLIATH (2010), GREATEST HITS (2012), KILLING STRANGERS (2013), THE PALACE (2013), LOS AUSENTES (2014), THE EMPTY CLASSROOM (2015), MINOTAURO (2015, K), TALES OF TWO WHO DREAMT (2016), MI PIEL, LUMINOSA (2019, K)