Sicario

An FBI agent specialized in hostage rescue, Kate Macer, is recruited onto a federal task force operating along the U.S.-Mexico border. The team is led by Matt Graver, a relaxed CIA officer who tells her almost nothing. A silent figure named Alejandro accompanies them. The team conducts increasingly extra-legal operations — a brutal extraction across the Juarez border, a brutal nighttime tunnel raid, a final mission in which Alejandro infiltrates a cartel boss's home and kills the boss and his family at a dinner table. The film reveals that Alejandro is a former Mexican prosecutor whose wife was beheaded and daughter killed by the same cartel boss years ago, that the CIA has weaponized his vengeance to consolidate the cartel power they prefer, and that Kate's only function in the operation has been to provide jurisdictional cover. The film ends with Alejandro forcing Kate to sign the documents legitimizing what was done.

On release, the film was praised for Roger Deakins's cinematography, Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, and the bravura set pieces — the convoy through Juarez, the night-vision tunnel raid. Most discussion has stayed at the level of craft.

Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan have built something more disturbing underneath the craft. The film is a sustained essay on how power actually operates at the boundary where institutional rules formally end. The border is the literal location, but the film's actual subject is the threshold between rule-bound society and the cosmos that rule-bound society depends on but never acknowledges. The threshold is patrolled by figures like Alejandro. The figures are not law enforcement. The figures are something older that law enforcement, in extremis, employs.

Josh Brolin's Matt Graver is the film's most quietly damning portrait. He wears sandals to operational briefings. He eats fast food in armored vehicles. He never raises his voice. He never looks worried. He runs an operation involving multiple international jurisdictions, dozens of armed men, and a sanctioned series of assassinations, and he runs it with the affect of a man on a particularly enjoyable golf weekend.

This is what the Demiurge looks like when the position has become normal to him. There is no malice. There is no theatricality. There is only the routine administration of an extraction operation that he has done many times before. He explains things to Kate when explaining things is convenient. He withholds when withholding is convenient. He does not torture; he simply does not provide.

Villeneuve's most cutting beat is the moment Matt's casual cruelty is exposed. Kate asks why they are crossing into Juarez when crossing is illegal. Matt explains that the crossing is to draw out a response. Kate asks what response. Matt says, smiling, 'You're asking me how a watch works. For now, just keep your eye on the time.' This is the Demiurge's catechism in three sentences. The administrator does not explain the machine to the user. The user is expected to trust the time the machine displays. Curiosity about the mechanism is impertinence.

Matt is not the villain of the film. He has read the cosmos accurately. The cartels are a fixture. They will exist. The only available policy is to manage which cartel dominates so that the violence is at least bounded. He has chosen the boundary. He is administering it. He is the manager of the underworld interface. The film does not endorse him. The film also refuses to give us the satisfaction of dismissing his analysis.

Sicario transmits a particular and disturbing recognition: that the rule-bound world most viewers inhabit is bounded by a much larger world in which the rules do not operate, and that the rule-bound world maintains its tidiness only because certain figures — sanctioned, employed, equipped — perform the work that the rule-bound world cannot acknowledge. The border is the visible edge of this arrangement. The arrangement extends much further than the border.

What the film leaves the viewer with is the structural understanding that idealism is not a viable strategy in conditions where the institutions themselves are merely the polite surface of older operations. Kate's idealism is not naive in the silly sense. It is naive in the more serious sense — it does not yet take seriously what kind of cosmos it is operating in. The film does not punish her for the naivete. The film simply shows what happens to the naivete when it makes contact with the actual structure.

The final scene — children playing soccer on a field as gunshots are heard in the distance, the children pausing briefly and then continuing the game — is Villeneuve's closing image of what the world is, beneath the news cycle and the policy paper. The violence is the background. The children adapt. The game continues. Villeneuve does not editorialize. The image is the diagnosis. Most policy debates do not reach this level of seriousness. The film does.