- UK release: October 2015
- Director: Denis Villeneuve · Writer: Taylor Sheridan
- Studio / distributor: Lionsgate; Black Label Media
- Genre: Crime thriller / border-war drama · Runtime: 121 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Emily Blunt (Edge of Tomorrow, Looper) as Kate Macer; Benicio del Toro (Traffic, 21 Grams) as Alejandro; Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Milk) as Matt Graver; Daniel Kaluuya (Kick-Ass 2) as Reggie Wayne
- IMDb: 7.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 92% critics / 85% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Denis Villeneuve has been circling Hollywood for a few years now, picking up admirers with Prisoners and Enemy and quietly becoming the director other directors talk about. Sicario is the film that confirms it. He takes a subject that could have been a routine war-on-drugs procedural, hands it to cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and turns it into something closer to a horror film about institutions. You watch most of it with your shoulders somewhere near your ears.
The setup
Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is an idealistic FBI agent running kidnap-response raids on the Arizona side of the border. After one raid turns up something worse than a hostage, she is recruited onto an inter-agency task force led by the breezily evasive Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), with a silent, watchful consultant called Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) attached to it. She is told the job is to disrupt a cartel. What she is not told is almost everything else, and the film keeps her, and us, a step behind the people actually running the operation. The pleasure and the dread both come from watching a competent professional realise she has been brought along as a witness, not a participant.
The cast
Blunt carries the film by refusing to soften Kate into a hero. She is capable, stubborn, and increasingly out of her depth, and Blunt plays the dawning understanding without ever tipping into hysteria. Brolin is enjoying himself enormously as Graver, flip-flops and golf shirts hiding a man who treats sovereign borders as a paperwork problem. The film belongs, though, to del Toro. Alejandro barely speaks for long stretches, and del Toro turns that stillness into the most unsettling presence in any thriller this year, a man whose calm tells you exactly how much violence he has already made peace with. Daniel Kaluuya, as Kate’s loyal partner Reggie, is the small human anchor at the edge of the frame, and a name worth remembering.
The craft
This is where Sicario becomes something special. Deakins shoots the border country as a beautiful, indifferent expanse, then drops the camera into a convoy crossing into Juárez and makes a traffic queue feel like a minefield. A night raid filmed in thermal and night-vision is the year’s most nerve-shredding sequence, and a long descent into a smuggling tunnel plays like the approach to something in a creature feature. Jóhannsson’s score does not so much accompany the images as press down on them, a low industrial groan that tells your body to be afraid before your head has worked out why. Villeneuve controls the tension with the patience of someone who knows that the wait is worse than the bang. The film is gorgeous and almost unbearable at the same time.
How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s sprawling 2000 drug-war mosaic, which also gave del Toro his finest hour on the same frontier. But Sicario is narrower and colder, less interested in the system as a whole than in one person discovering she is a pawn in it. It shares the moral exhaustion of Zero Dark Thirty, the procedural eye trained on dirty work done in the name of results, and it owes an unmistakable debt to No Country for Old Men in its sun-bleached menace and its sense that the old rules no longer apply at the edge of the map. Taylor Sheridan’s script, his first to reach the screen, has the bones of a genre thriller and the soul of something bleaker.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 92%, praising Villeneuve’s control, Deakins’ camera and the wall-to-wall dread. Audiences are a little cooler at 85%, and the gap makes sense. This is a film that withholds, that keeps its protagonist and its viewer disoriented on purpose, and that ends somewhere far harsher than a conventional thriller would dare. If you came for catharsis you will leave unsettled. I think that is the film working exactly as intended rather than a flaw, but I understand why some viewers feel cheated of a cleaner resolution.
Verdict
Sicario is a thriller built by people at the top of their craft, and it knows precisely what it is doing to you for every one of its 121 minutes. Blunt grounds it, del Toro haunts it, Deakins and Jóhannsson turn the screws, and Villeneuve proves he can hold an audience in white-knuckle tension without a single wasted scene. It loses a fraction for how deliberately it keeps you at arm’s length, and it is not a film you reach for casually on a quiet evening. But as a piece of pure tension-craft it is close to flawless, and del Toro alone makes me want to watch it again. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, on general release from 8 October. See it in a proper auditorium where the sound design can do its work.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Villeneuve went straight from here to Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, confirming the run of form Sicario announced, and the film earned three Oscar nominations, including one for Deakins. A sequel, Sicario 2: Soldado (2018), followed Alejandro and Graver without Blunt or Villeneuve, and lands well short of the original’s grip. Jóhann Jóhannsson, who wrote that extraordinary score, died in 2018. The film now streams across the usual rental and subscription platforms and is well worth seeking out on disc for the picture and sound.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, images of dead bodies, strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are scenes in which men are shot and blood spurts from the wounds.
Language: Several uses of strong language (‘motherf**ker’, ‘f**k’), as well as some milder bad language (‘bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘pissed off’, ‘Jesus Christ’).
Injury detail: There are scenes featuring bloodstained corpses, some with injury detail, and there are also scenes showing naked corpses hanging from a bridge. There is a scene showing a man bleeding from a throat wound and one in which a man’s severed hand is shown.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
