Los Lobos movie review & film summary (2020)

Figments of memory, patches of non-fiction, and outbursts of animation harmonize as the director, whose previous coming-of-age story “We Are Mari Pepa” centered on a teen rock-band, begets a fresh entry into the pantheon of thoughtful studies on young lives. “Los Lobos” shares ranks with Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” or Jeremiah Zagar’s “We the Animals,” rather than with tired immigration dramas.

Meditative landscape images, courtesy of cinematographer Octavio Arauz, track the passage from Tlajomulco, Jalisco to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Lucía (Martha Reyes Arias) aims to resettle with her two children. A disheveled apartment, the only one she can afford, becomes a precarious blank slate for them to build a home. As the plot slowly advances, the place evolves once they’ve made it, humbly, their own.

Despite not crossing the border through dangerous avenues, Lucia lacks documents to legally work stateside, and must take on multiple grueling labor jobs—not unlike countless others immigrant parents. She has no choice but to leave her beloved baby wolves, as she calls them, alone. Inside their kingdom of imaginative innocence, a carpeted space without much furniture, real-life brothers Maximiliano and Leonardo Nájar Márquez mine magic from the humdrum hours waiting for mom to return. Small, yet markedly specific details of childhood, such as the “Chumbala Cachumbala” kids song about dancing skeletons that Leo recites effusively, or the plastic luchador figures that take part in their fraternal playground, brim with lived-in sincerity.

“Los Lobos” is heavily laden with precious moments that emerge from a combination of what Kishi Leopo and his co-writers Luis Briones and Sofía Gómez-Córdova fabricate, how the actors interpret it, and the reality of where the story is set. This includes the three-member wolf pack’s efforts to preserve their grandpa’s voice, to a Día de Muertos ofrenda and makeshift Halloween costumes, or the dark symbolism behind a light bulb.

Handcrafted animated sequences, stylized to give the impression that the brothers drew them with crayons on the walls or on discarded pieces of paper, further our understanding of their culture shock and tough adaptation process. In these segments, created by Guadalajara-based studio Platypus Animation of which Kishi Leopo is a co-founder, Max and Leo appear as their ninja wolves alter egos, adorably cartoonish creatures that capture their state of mind and brotherly love.

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