Review: Identifying Features Is a Haunting Lament for a Nation in a Holding Pattern

Identifying Features is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing.

Identifying Features
Photo: Kino Lorber

The camera withholds so much in Fernanda Valadez’s Identifying Features, often focusing near-exclusively on faces. In an early scene, Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) and her neighbor, Chuya (Laura Elena Ibarra), consult with a police officer about their sons, who haven’t been heard from since they left to cross the border into the United States. We never clearly see the officer, who, after telling the women that he can’t help them, is briefly glimpsed in the background of the frame before returning with a thick binder of photos—of recently discovered corpses—for them to peruse. We don’t see most of the photos either, but you can tell from the women’s faces and body language that what they reveal is almost too much too bear. Chuya finds her son inside that binder, unmistakable from the white birth mark around his right eye and forehead, but Magdalena is left searching for hers.

Valadez asserts the camera’s gaze as a tool for empathy throughout her feature-length directorial debut, which traces Magdalena’s quest to find her son. Her journey intersects with that of Olivia (Ana Laura Rodríguez), another mother who’s also looking for her missing son, and that of Miguel (David Illescas), a young man on his way home after being deported back to Mexico. As these characters converse with various officials, Valadez largely eschews traditional shot-reverse shots in favor of long takes that convey a sense of escalating devastation on the faces of her characters as they realize that any help they get will be hard won.

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Valadez’s aesthetics also capture the mundane horror of a faceless bureaucracy going about the grim and clinical business of cataloguing the devastation wreaked upon people by vicious gangs and institutional failure. It’s a failure that’s become normalized, evident in everything from the long, orderly lines that people stand in to the trucks full of bodies and the blood tests that are performed in order to link the living to the dead. But Valdez understands that the impersonal nature of this system’s workers is a reaction to another problem, an outgrowth of a climate where these individuals fear for their jobs and, by extension, their lives in an area wracked by violence and disappearances. Valadez frames one woman completely off screen as she steers Magdalena, almost in a whisper, in the direction of where her son might be, channeling the woman’s understanding that she must maintain a safe distance, or else.

Identifying Features builds upon this atmosphere with striking plays on light and shade: a gentle sun glanced through tree branches, the pitch-black night cut by flickers of lightning, and the harsh glow of a fire that gives skin a red hue. In the desolate and remote rural community of La Fragua, a vehicle’s headlights become oppressive in the dark, signaling to Magdalena and Miguel that they aren’t alone and revealing little about who’s behind the wheel. Throughout, Valadez depicts the film’s environments with the same precision as her despairing characters, in an ocean of brake lights just out of focus and the dilapidated walls and churches that rise solemnly beyond the plant life. From this confluence of imagery, the filmmaker extracts tension and dread, especially in one late scene that simulates the blurred vision of an old man (Manuel Campos) to show us what no one else can see.

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All the while, the characters look for signs of the people they knew among lifeless things, the expressionless faces of the dead and belongings left unclaimed. In this way, Identifying Features is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing, about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all. At once point, Olivia either cannot or refuses to identify a body presented to her as that of her son, and Miguel can draw few conclusions about what might have happened to his mother from the emptiness of her home. Chuya’s son is identified by his birthmark, but Magdalena’s son, she’s told, may well have been burned beyond any possible identification. When she spots what appears to be his bag among some discarded items, its presence reveals nothing about where he might be. And so she continues to search for him, trapped in a holding pattern of uncertainty, her individual pleas for help and understanding drowned out among so many others.

Score: 
 Cast: Mercedes Hernández, David Illescas, Juan Jesús Varela, Ana Laura Rodríguez, Laura Elena Ibarra, Xicoténcatl Ulloa  Director: Fernanda Valadez  Screenwriter: Fernanda Valadez, Astrid Rondero  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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