Óscar escapes from rehab, and Mário wakes up with images that don’t belong to him — no memories of his previous life. Thus are separated the two brothers living on the outskirts of Mexico City. The latter encounters Lázaro, who becomes his mystic mentor: in the underground, countless portals open to the supernatural. Clemente Castor’s work has long explored Mexican youth and their tormented bodies — Cold Metal continues along that path.
“Keep playing, keep choosing… but it’s the arrow that will decide the prize,” sings a young woman in the opening sequence of Frío Metal, by Clemente Castor. Shot on the outskirts of Mexico City, the film is driven by fortune, which guides the narrative centered on Mario, a young man who awakens without memory. From this seemingly simple scenic game, a complex web is drawn that stitches, opens, and tensions perceptions. Upon meeting Lázaro who teaches him how to enter the bodies of other people through holes in the ground, Mario’s own body becomes a matter of passage, a mediator of pains and possibilities. Yes, it is indeed too profound; too dense. But Castor’s cinema is made of this rare matter that excavates, with an intense and intimate camera, the fissures of a contemporary Mexico. In this second feature film he returns to character-actors and landscape-settings, continuing in the construction of films so dense that they seem, literally, able to be held in one’s hands.
Lucas Camargo de Barros
