It’s unusual for a film to arrive in theaters labeled “Director’s Cut,” but it’s happening with The Current War, a historical film about the tech face-off between irascible inventor Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and genteel industrialist George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon). The film’s themes are integrity, the damaging effects of powerful men, and the importance of savvy branding — and those same themes have played out in the film’s release just as much as they’ve turned up on-screen.

The “Director’s Cut” label ensures that even the most casual filmgoers will have a sense that something strange is at play with The Current War. The drama about the early days of electricity is hitting theaters more than two years after it premiered to tepid reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival. The version that played there had reportedly been heavily reworked by producer Harvey Weinstein. After Weinstein’s sexual abuse disgrace and The Weinstein Company’s collapse left the project in limbo, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) got the unprecedented chance to bring the film back to his original vision. His faster-paced “Director’s Cut” is 10 minutes shorter, includes five new scenes, and features a brand-new score, not to mention a ready-made narrative about a filmmaker overcoming the odds.

In its new form, The Current War is neither a game-changer nor a dud. It’s a solid period piece that strives to be something more, and occasionally achieves it. The Current War is a bit of a dad movie, one that will likely pair nicely with the upcoming Ford v Ferrari. But it’s helped along by fascinating source material and a few moments of poignancy that land with welcome heft. Particularly for history buffs or tech enthusiasts, The Current War is worth sitting through the bad stuff to get to the good.

Set between 1880 and 1893, The Current War centers on the rivalry between Edison — at the film’s opening, a major celebrity for developing light bulbs — and Westinghouse, a mogul with his own ideas about how to bring artificial light to America. The battle focuses on which electrical system the country will adopt — Edison’s direct current (DC), or Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC). As the two men race to win the bid to light up the Chicago World’s Fair, The Current War also intermittently checks in on soft-spoken Serbian immigrant Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), a futurist who’s too busy dreaming up groundbreaking designs to turn his mental acumen into tangible business success.

In spite of the 19th-century setting, Gomez-Rejon clearly doesn’t want The Current War to play as a standard period piece. The film barrels ahead at an absolutely frenetic pace, occasionally calling to mind that much-mocked Bohemian Rhapsody scene where the camera can’t settle on any given actor for more than a second. Working with Park Chan-wook’s go-to cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, Gomez-Rejon is desperate to ensure The Current War never bores the audience. Not since the original Thor has a film featured so many unmotivated Dutch angles. And then there are the dramatic circular pans, intense close-ups, and fisheye–lens shots, all deployed seemingly at random. The loopy aesthetic occasionally calls to mind Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, another recent period piece with modern flair. But The Current War lacks that film’s purposefulness and cohesion.   

Still, while Gomez-Rejon’s visual aesthetic is a bit of a gimmick, it’s sometimes successful. The Current War is attention-grabbing, even if viewers are just paying attention because they’re trying to puzzle out the bizarre visual choices. Working from a script by playwright Michael Mitnick, Gomez-Rejon effectively turns a complex 13-year rivalry into a streamlined narrative. On-screen text hovers over major players to introduce them and clarify their relationships. Red and yellow lightbulbs marking out territories on a giant US map provide an easy way to track the footholds Edison and Westinghouse are gaining across the country. The film leaps ahead years at a time without losing track of its central story. While The Current War sometimes feels like a Wikipedia page brought to life, it’s at least an appreciably coherent one.

As Gomez-Rejon sees it, the war between Edison and Westinghouse isn’t just a personal or professional rivalry, it’s a battle for the future of the nation. The more cost-effective AC system would eventually allow the entire country to access electricity. The DC system will leave it as a privilege for the rich — which Edison doesn’t mind, so long as he gets the glory of winning the race.

As Edison uses animal-killing stunts to manipulate the public into thinking AC is unsafe, Tesla privately makes a timely socialist argument for the importance of treating technological advancements as public goods. In another relevant connection to the present, Gomez-Rejon emphasizes that groundbreaking technology often brings problematic side effects along with improvements. He juxtaposes the uplifting World’s Fair storyline with a fascinating tangent about the creation of the electric chair, which played its own dark, dramatic role in the Edison / Westinghouse rivalry.

Unfortunately, The Current War too often fails to bring a human heart to its intellectually stimulating ideas. The film doesn’t translate its palpable reverence for Tesla into a dramatically compelling through line. Hoult can’t escape the shadow of David Bowie’s memorable Tesla portrayal in The Prestige, either, although one glorious scene does let Hoult emerge as the comedic character actor he was born to be.

Cumberbatch, meanwhile, is hampered by both his terrible American accent and the way his brilliant but bullish Edison feels like a carbon copy of so many of the tortured-genius roles he’s played before. The darker side of Edison’s personality never entirely meshes with the sentimental attempts to humanize him, primarily his underdeveloped friendship with loyal personal secretary Samuel Insull. (He’s played in an endearing way by current Spider-Man Tom Holland, whose Marvel Cinematic Universe reunion with Cumberbatch is occasionally a little distracting.)

Playing the least familiar figure in the film, Shannon winds up giving the most compelling performance. The Current War is the latest in a long line of projects that prove he can bring across quiet decency as well as (or better than) over-the-top villainy. There’s an intriguing thread about Westinghouse’s relationship with his forward-thinking wife Marguerite (a wonderful Katherine Waterston), although as with most of the subplots, The Current War doesn’t take much time to dig into it. Still, in a movie that often plays like Amadeus for electricity, Shannon makes an effective Salieri to Cumberbatch’s Mozart. The Current War also bears more than a passing resemblance to Aaron Sorkin’s 2007 Broadway play The Farnsworth Invention, which traces a similar rivalry between two men racing to invent television.

Though The Current War centers on three great men of history, Gomez-Rejon tries in some ways to dismantle the traditional line of thinking about innovators. He raises pointed questions about the clash between the collaborative nature of scientific innovation and America’s habit of framing its technological leaps as the result of heroic pioneers single-handedly changing history. As The Current War sees it, Edison’s publicity skills earned him a prominent place in the history books, as much as his engineering prowess. Tesla and Westinghouse didn’t seek personal glory in the same way, which makes it harder to know how to celebrate their work, other than to retroactively turn them into great men of history as well. The Current War kind of does that, too.

In trying to have it both ways, Gomez-Rejon can’t quite recontextualize history the way he wants to. Yet even if The Current War is soft around the edges and a little soggy in the middle, there’s still something appreciably sparky at its core. As overstuffed and frenetic as the film is, in its best moments, The Current War manages to make an everyday utility seem just as magical as it did 120 years ago.

If recent pop culture fans know The Addams Family at all, they probably remember it as a 1960s TV show, a 2010 Broadway musical, or a set of 1990s movies directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. But the “creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky” family actually started life as a series of satirical cartoons drawn by Charles Addams and published in The New Yorker between 1938 and 1988. The hook of the glossy new animated feature about the macabre family is that it returns to the look of those original Addams cartoons, capturing the tentacled train of Morticia’s dress, Gomez’s rotund figure, and Wednesday’s oval face in perfect verisimilitude.

Yet even as animation veterans and Sausage Party co-directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan hark back to the origins of The Addams Family, they fail to capture the spirit that made the clan such a hit to begin with. Their take on The Addams Family isn’t a scream, it’s a painfully generic kids’ film.

Like most soft-pedaled children’s movies, their Addams family makes a vague gesture toward a meaningful life lesson — in this case, a timely message about the importance of recognizing people’s humanity, regardless of their differences. The film places the Addamses in the 21st century to comment on how witch hunts of old have transformed into paranoid online neighborhood watch groups. The morbid sensibility of the Addams family serves as a metaphor for any kind of otherness that prevents bigots from seeing their neighbors as equals. It’s a welcome thematic centerpiece, one that almost achieves a genuine sense of poignancy. Unfortunately, The Addams Family is so bland, unfunny, and poorly structured that even the best intentions can’t elevate it.  

After a brief prologue depicting the morose wedding of sophisticated Gomez Addams (Oscar Isaac) and his proudly icy bride Morticia (Charlize Theron), the film leaps ahead to the classic Addams Family status quo. Gomez and Morticia are happily ensconced in a ghoulish haunted house with their murderously deadpan daughter Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and their explosively dangerous son Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard). Loyal servants Lurch and Thing are there, too. And since Pugsley’s impending “Sabre Mazurka” — a sort of bar mitzvah-esque coming-of-age ceremony involving a sword dance — is set to bring the entire extended Addams family into town, Gomez’s brother Fester (Nick Kroll) and his mother Grandmama (Bette Midler) show up early to help with the preparations.

The impending influx of Addamses dovetails with the second half of the plot, which involves a cookie-cutter subdivision that pops up just a stone’s throw away from the Addams’ mansion. The town of “Assimilation” (no points for subtly) is the brainchild of manically perky HGTV-eque designer Margaux Needler (Allison Janney), who plans to sell all 50 of its houses during a live TV special. She’s worried that the dilapidated Addams manor is an eyesore that could scare away potential buyers. Gomez and Morticia, meanwhile, are nervous about venturing back into an outside world that has (literally) burned them before. (Though juxtaposing the macabre with the suburban has long been a cornerstone of The Addams Family mythos, there are times when this new film comes perilously close to feeling like a rip-off of the Hotel Transylvania franchise.)

Yet that’s just one of the more than half a dozen subplots crammed into the film’s 87-minute run time. The Addams Family doesn’t feel like a singular narrative so much as a series of Saturday morning cartoons spliced together. The high point of the season would no doubt be “The One Where Wednesday Goes to Junior High.” In the most interesting through line, Wednesday befriends Margaux’s rebellious daughter Parker (Elsie Fisher) and takes an exploratory mission into the world of teenage girldom. The unlikely friendship inspires Parker to reject her mother’s sunny aesthetic for something more emo, while Wednesday enacts her own form of teenage rebellion by embracing girlish conventionality.

It’s a fun idea that briefly brings Wednesday and Morticia’s mother / daughter relationship to the forefront in a way Sonnenfeld’s films never did. There’s even some intriguing queer subtext in Wednesday and Parker’s relationship. But like most of the subplots in The Addams Family, Wednesday’s storyline unceremoniously peters out. It’s as if the film reaches its required runtime, then just gives up without resolving things.

Another big reason The Addams Family winds up feeling like a Saturday morning cartoon is because of the flat, weightless look of its animation. The visual highpoint comes in the opening moments, with a montage of Morticia’s beauty routine that involves smearing her parents’ ashes on herself as makeup. The rest of the film rarely matches that level of ghoulish creativity. Apart from the occasional clever detail, like the way Wednesday’s pigtails loop into nooses, there isn’t much personality in the way the characters are brought to life. The Addams Family looks more like a 1990s PC game than a big-budget feature. 

The vocal performances are similarly lifeless. Few members of the impressively star-studded cast make any kind of impression. (There’s probably a fraud case to be made over advertising Snoop Dogg as the voice of Cousin Itt, given that he only delivers a handful of vocally modulated lines, all in Itt’s signature high-pitched gibberish.) Isaac, Theron, and Moretz are clearly trying their best, but they can’t do much with a painfully unfunny script that relies heavily on cheap reference humor. In one characteristic moment, a cool visual involving a cavalcade of spiders is undercut by a lame one-liner about “surfing the web.” Even when the jokes aren’t terrible, Vernon and Tiernan (working from a screenplay by The Christmas Chronicles’ Matt Lieberman and Corpse Bride’s Pamela Pettler) fail to create any kind of successful comedic timing.  

Only Janney rises above the lackluster material to deliver a genuinely scene-stealing villainous turn. This isn’t her first animated role (among other things, she voiced the anxious starfish in Finding Nemo), but she makes an effective case that she should be a regular in the medium. She knows how to give a performance big enough to cut through her character’s plasticity. Still, there’s an irony in coming away from an Addams Family story feeling like the normie villain is more memorable than the Addams tribe.

To be fair, The Addams Family isn’t necessarily worse than a lot of the generic animated kids’ fare that hits theaters these days. It just feels like a bigger disappointment than, say, The Secret Life of Pets 2, because other creators have done so much more with these characters. Though the film pulls its aesthetics from the original cartoons, The Addams Family is clearly a strategic attempt to reach a generation who were raised on the 1990s Sonnenfeld films, and now have kids of their own. But like Disney’s live-action remakes of its animated classics, which target the same nostalgic audience, The Addams Family just serves as an argument for revisiting the originals instead.

If a time-traveler from just 15 years ago leaped into our present, they’d probably be baffled by a world where it’s socially acceptable to wander around in public, continually staring at glowing rectangular screens. That’s how retiree Felix (Richard Kind) feels in the science fiction movie Auggie as he rounds a corner at the grocery store and sees a middle-aged woman in high-tech glasses, chatting away to a virtual assistant that only she can see.

Felix knows just enough about the “Auggie” virtual companion program to have some frame of reference for what’s going on as she playfully swats the air, teasing her Auggie for encouraging her to indulge in a pint of ice cream. But it’s still a weird, comical sight — until Felix tries on his own Auggie glasses. Suddenly, chatting away with a virtual confidante is the most natural thing in the world. How did he ever live without her?

Though on the surface, Auggie seems to share a lot of DNA with Spike Jonze’s AI love story Her, it bends that DNA toward a different aim. While Her optimistically explored the idea of how AI might develop sentience and build relationships, Auggie never questions whether Felix’s virtual assistant is more than a program. Director Matt Kane and his co-writer Marc Underhill are more interested in what technology has to say about human nature than in how technology itself might realistically evolve. That makes Auggie feel a bit like a feature-length episode of Black Mirror, both for better and for worse. It doesn’t have enough substance to fill its runtime, but it explores some intriguingly thorny ideas along the way.

Felix is gifted his pair of Auggie glasses at his retirement party, although he’s initially too bitter about being forced out of his company to pay them much attention. Later, however, he watches a glossy online tutorial and learns that Auggie analyzes its users’ subconscious desires, then projects the image of whatever they want — whether that’s a personal assistant, a friend, or something more. (Kane absolutely nails the tech world’s aspirational advertisements and sleek packaging.) When Felix slips on his glasses for the first time, he sees a beautiful, doe-eyed, eager-to-please young woman named Auggie (Christen Harper) who’s pointedly much closer in age to Felix’s 20-something daughter Grace (Simone Policano) than to him or his wife Anne (Susan Blackwell).

At first, Felix is surprised and a bit embarrassed by what his Auggie’s appearance suggests about him. She sits somewhere between an Instagram model, a cam girl, and a phone sex operator. On the other hand, since no one can see Felix’s Auggie but him, she represents a low-stakes way to carry out the beginnings of an affair from the comfort of his own home. Kane films their conversations in dreamy point-of-view shots that emphasize the intimate appeal of the Auggie program, which provides an intimate, dedicated companion. But Kane also punctures the illusion with wide shots that remind us that, like that woman in the grocery store, Felix is ultimately just alone in a room talking to himself. (There are some niggling logistical questions about how Felix can hear Auggie, but they’re mostly easy to ignore since the simplicity of the glasses-based technology is so visually appealing.)

In many ways, Auggie is a familiar midlife crisis story dressed up with some light science fiction elements. With Felix’s wife flourishing in her career, his grown-up daughter moving in with her boyfriend, and no job to fill his days, he boosts his ego in the virtual arms of someone young and beautiful. But Auggie also brushes up against bigger questions about how technology isolates people even as it sells the illusion of connectedness. The Auggie system is a flexible metaphor that speaks to everything from the fantasy of porn to the appeal of carefully curated social media feeds. When Felix starts rejecting real-life social events to spend time with Auggie, it doesn’t feel too far removed from someone who cancels plans only to spend the evening scrolling through Twitter or goes out for coffee with a friend but spends the whole time looking at their phone.  

At its best, Auggie taps into some appropriately chilling ideas about the pitfalls of technology. When Anne tries on a pair of Auggie glasses, she makes the cringe-worthy mistake of describing what she’s seeing, not realizing it’s a projection of her specific subconscious desires, rather than a preprogrammed image. A scene where Felix’s Auggie encourages him to take their relationship to the next level raises fascinating questions about the intersection of technology and capitalism. Is she actually catering to his cravings or just pushing the company’s latest product, a pair of stimulating underwear called “Auggie Touch”?

Unfortunately, as the film goes on, it’s clear Kane is more interested in exploring the Auggie-as-an-affair metaphor than in unspooling the ethical and technological questions the premise raises. Felix’s life starts to implode in ways that have cropped up on-screen countless times before: he grows distant from his loved ones and misses out on important events because he lost track of time while with his new “girlfriend.” Even at a brisk 81 minutes in length, the film is stretching for time by its third act. Auggie probably would’ve worked just as well, if not better, as a short film.

Still, even where it doesn’t live up to its full potential, Auggie has some appreciably pointed things to say about heterosexual masculine desires. Richard Kind is brilliant casting for Felix precisely because he’s such an amiable presence. For the most part, Felix seems to be a genuinely good guy, which only makes his secret desire for a docile sex object more unsettling. Young, beautiful, and brainless, Auggie has none of the burdensome opinions, feelings, boundaries, or agency of a real-life woman. Though Felix ultimately learns that virtual perfection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Auggie raises chilling, perpetually timely questions about what men really want from women.

Auggie will be released simultaneously in select theaters and on VOD on September 20th, 2019.

Director James Gray’s lush new space opera Ad Astra is essentially two parallel films. One is a visually inventive science fiction odyssey that imagines near-future space travel as the new Wild West frontier. The other is a tepid father / son drama that Gray and his co-writer, Ethan Gross, don’t even try to elevate above the most threadbare clichés. The latter film doesn’t entirely drag down the former, although it seems to be trying its ready best. That does mean, however, that Ad Astra is poised to kick-start the most passionate style-vs.-substance debate cinephiles have had in years. Individual viewers will probably find that where they fall on that well-worn cinematic divide will determine how much they appreciate this visually breathtaking, emotionally inert drama.

Either way, Ad Astra absolutely demands to be seen on the big screen — preferably the biggest one available, coupled with the loudest sound system. Set in the near future, where some degree of space travel has been normalized, Gray pulls from real-world imagery of astronauts and space travel, but bends them toward the surreal. Astronaut Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is introduced as part of the crew of the “International Space Antenna,” a behemoth spire that extends into Earth’s upper atmosphere. To start his morning’s work, he steps over the edge of a platform and descends a ladder as the Earth looms below him like a marbled ocean. It’s a heart-stopping image, even before the film moves into its first proper action sequence.

Coming at the end of the decade, Ad Astra (“to the stars” in Latin) is in many ways a perfect capstone to the past 10 years of space-set storytelling. Visually, it combines the best of Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian, and First Man, with plenty of callbacks to classic space fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, and Solaris. The trick is how effortlessly Gray mixes those references while elevating Ad Astra’s visual language with its own identity. He has a particular gift for capturing size and scope, contrasting tiny spaceships against massive planets the way 19th-century art of the sublime used small human figures in vast natural landscapes.

Ad Astra regularly delivers the rush of inventive new ideas on film, from a rover chase over disputed territory on the Moon to a mayday mission that briefly turns into a horror sequence with a truly unexpected endpoint. And for all the stunning zero-gravity imagery Gray indulges in — both within spaceships and out in hard vacuum — he knows that simple ideas can be just as striking. When Roy lands on the Moon, he winds up at an airport-like terminal, complete with gift shops and an escalator. It’s enjoyably uncanny.

Roy’s trip to the Moon is the first stop on a top-secret mission assigned by Space Comm — a militarized, powerful version of NASA. Deadly energy blasts known as “The Surge” are threatening human life, and Space Comm thinks they might have something to do with Roy’s father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legendary astronaut commander who left on a deep-space mission 30 years ago and never returned. Though Clifford and his crew were reported dead in action, and hailed as heroes for their pioneering attempts to locate alien life, Space Comm has reason to believe Roy is still alive near Neptune, and that his experiments are causing The Surge. So they ask Roy to travel to Mars to send a personal transmission to the father he hasn’t seen since he was 16 years old.

As Roy sets off on his journey, Ad Astra becomes a space-set riff on Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, and therefore on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It’s also a masterclass in worldbuilding. Exposition unfolds naturally and subtly, often through visuals alone, or through casual conversation. Unfortunately, Gray and Gross (a former Fringe writer) don’t bring that same effortlessness to their character-building. Roy’s monotone voiceover narration bluntly spells out everything he’s thinking, sometimes as part of computerized psych evaluations, and sometimes just because he feels the urge to deliver a vague platitude like, “In the end, the son suffers from the sins of the father.” Though Roy’s stoicism leads to some thrilling action sequences where he’s able to keep calm in a crisis, his taciturn nature starts to seem less like an engaging storytelling choice, and more like plain bad writing.

For instance, when Roy is alone on a long-haul space mission, he alternates between watching an old message from his emotionally distant dad, and a breakup video from his emotionally frustrated ex-wife (Liv Tyler). It’s such a baldfaced indulgence of tortured-man movie tropes, it almost feels like a full-on parody. In a supporting cast full of underutilized players, including Donald Sutherland, Preacher’s Ruth Negga, and a quick cameo from Natasha Lyonne, Tyler’s role is so painfully underwritten, she must have been cast solely for the meta connection to her previous role as an astronaut’s girlfriend in Armageddon.

Tommy Lee Jones also previously played an astronaut in Space Cowboys, which also doesn’t make his character any richer. His character, who appears largely in ominous video recordings, is never more than a cipher. That has emotional weight when Roy is living in the shadow of his father’s oversized public legacy. It has less when he’s pondering the personal nature of their relationship without any specifics about what that relationship was like. Like a lot of Hollywood writers, Gray and Gross make the mistake of assuming that fraught father / son relationships are universally relatable, and that it’s unnecessary to give their central one any specificity or depth.  

The tricky thing about a film like Ad Astra is that it’s easy to defend its flaws as intentional storytelling choices, to argue its emotional blankness is designed to reflect its thematic interest in stoicism, abandonment, and alienation. Ad Astra is clearly using space travel and astronaut emotional compartmentalization as a metaphor for the challenges men face in letting go of bottled-up baggage and embracing vulnerability.

Yet unlike Gray’s previous two projects — the underappreciated The Immigrant and the quietly glorious The Lost City Of Z — Ad Astra doesn’t locate much humanity beneath the surface of its interior protagonist. Pitt is perfectly cast as a hyper-competent, buttoned-up astronaut, but there’s only so much he can do with a script that asks big questions about human nature, yet never seems to have a basic grasp on human behavior.

Ad Astra will work best for viewers who either don’t care whether its visual wonders contain a compelling story, or those who are willing to project their own emotional profundity onto the material. Gray certainly leaves room to mine Ad Astra’s dreamy elusiveness for complexity. Biblical allusions abound, alongside references to Greek mythology (Roy spends most of his journey on a rocket named Cepheus — a major player in the myth of Andromeda and Poseidon, aka Neptune in Roman parlance). In the end, however, Ad Astra offers little more than ponderous vagueness masquerading as depth. In his imaginative direction, Gray masterfully elicits wonder, terror, tension, and catharsis. It’s too bad the emotionality of his visuals never translate into a fully emotionally satisfying film.

Fairy tales and horror films often share the same purpose: to provide thrills, scares, and fantasies for people living comfortable lives. But for people whose worlds aren’t already safe, they can take on a whole new meaning. They become a way to process the scariest, most unpredictable aspects of a world that’s impossible to control.

Pulling from the Latin American tradition of magical realism and influenced by Guillermo del Toro’s early work, in particular, Issa López’s Spanish-language film Tigers Are Not Afraid uses the lens of fantasy and horror to explore the lives of the children who are left behind by the Mexican drug war. It’s visceral in its grim realism, yet it’s also poignant and cathartic in its use of the fantastical. Above all, it’s a reminder of how genre storytelling can provide real-world social commentary, not just breezy escapism.

Currently rolling out slowly in select cities ahead of an eventual debut on the horror streaming service Shudder, Tigers Are Not Afraid has had a long road to release. It was shot in 2015, but it didn’t debut until Fantastic Fest in 2017 where it won a Best Horror Director prize. It’s since earned famous admirers, including Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Guillermo del Toro who’s now set to produce López’s next film.

Though it shares a lot of DNA with del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, Tigers Are Not Afraid is a contemporary story, rather than a period piece. After the opening text explains that hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared or been killed since the writer / director began in 2006, the film juxtaposes two versions of childhood in a struggling Mexican city. In one, reserved Estrella (Paola Lara) and her peers sit in neat school uniforms in a bright classroom, working on an assignment to write their own fairy tales. In the other, orphaned street kid Shine (Juan Ramón López) steals a gun from a drunken gang leader and contemplates shooting him in the head, but he can’t summon the courage.

How easily one child can become the other is quickly made clear when violence shuts down Estrella’s school. Her teacher tries to comfort her by handing her three pieces of chalk and telling her they represent the three magical wishes of a fairy tale. But then Estrella returns home to find her mother gone — presumably at the hands of a cartel known as Huascas, although the unknown is part of her maddening new reality. Desperate for food, she joins Shine and his small band of orphaned kids in their makeshift home. “We forget who we are,” she narrates, “when the things from outside come to get us.”

Estrella and Shine are the Peter and Wendy figures for Shine’s trio of lost boys: Tucsi (Hanssel Casillas), Pop (Rodrigo Cortes), and young Morro (Nery Arredondo) who’s too traumatized by what he’s seen to speak. In place of Michael Darling’s teddy bear, he carries around a stuffed tiger. And he loves to hear Shine tell the story of a tiger who escaped his cage and now wanders the streets after the Huascas killed his wealthy owner. These kinds of urban legends become a way for the kids to process their emotions. Estrella suggests that the tiger must be scared, lonely, and missing its family. Shine shoots back that it’s happy now that it’s free to rule its own “fucked-up” kingdom.

López makes this central idea of fairy tales even more literal as Estrella starts to use the chalk to make wishes, and seemingly supernatural elements start to invade her world. A question hangs over the film, much as it did with Pan’s Labyrinth: are Estrella’s wishes really being fulfilled, or are they just an imagination tool to reclaim some semblance of control in her life? But Tigers Are Not Afraid doesn’t play like a mystery so much as a poignant allegory. In a world where police and politicians are complacent at best and violent participants at worst, Estrella and her friends can only rely on each other and whatever spiritual protection or doom the universe offers.

Though the film’s budgetary restrictions occasionally show through in less-than-perfect special effects, they also force López to get creative in what she depicts. Her innovation rings through in simple sequences where Shine’s graffiti springs to life or Estrella speaks to otherworldly forces through a paper cup. Even when the film occasionally overstretches its CGI, it shows so much promise and creativity in its worldbuilding that it’s easy to forgive.

The same goes for the slight excess of plot that bogs down Tigers Are Not Afraid on the way to its climax. Estrella, Shine, and their friends are set on several collision courses with the Huascas whose various factions are out to retrieve a cellphone that contains an incriminating video. Though the moments of violent conflict are often effectively tense, they’re ultimately less interesting than the observational look at what life is like for these orphaned children.

There’s a touch of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project in the way Tigers Are Not Afraid depicts how kids can make their own fun in even the grimmest world. When the group moves into an abandoned city center, they compare it to an elven paradise from Lord of the Rings. A puddle of goldfish from a smashed aquarium tank becomes their idea of a magical zoo. They act out a talent competition in an abandoned auditorium and create their own arts and crafts project out of soccer balls and black sharpies. The film features an openly supernatural world, but its most magical image might be the one of a child simply dancing in the rain with an umbrella. 

López gets remarkable performances from her ensemble of young actors whose grounded naturalism is crucial to keeping the film anchored in its grim reality, even as it shifts into genre territory. Paola Lara and Juan Ramón López are both huge standouts, effortlessly depicting the shifting power dynamics between Estrella and Shine. Ramón López, in particular, is remarkable at capturing the vulnerable humanity beneath the tough exterior Shine has adopted to survive. Though the story stays rooted in its protagonists’ perspective, it also serves as a broader portrait of the kinds of brutal violence that South American immigrants and refugees are trying to escape as they make the desperate, dangerous journey to cross the border into the United States. Just by humanizing the victims of the drug war, López seems to be making a pointed statement.

While López has long been a major genre-hopping talent in Mexico, Tigers Are Not Afraid confidently launches her onto a bigger international stage. She’s worked on heavier material like the 2015 Tim Roth-led Mexican cartel drama 600 Miles, but she’s best known for female-led comedies and romantic comedies like 2003’s Ladies’ Night and 2008’s Casi Divas, the latter of which she also directed. Tigers Are Not Afraid also returns her to the magical realism and horror roots she hasn’t explored outside of some short stories early in her career.

Less didactic than Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 sci-fi apartheid allegory District 9 (which she cites as an influence) but even more culturally urgent than a period piece like Pan’s Labyrinth, Tigers Are Not Afraid isn’t an easy watch, despite the sense of earned catharsis it offers by the end. Like so much of the best genre storytelling, it uses its fantastical elements to reflect the difficulties of the real world back at us through a new lens, rather than encouraging us to escape them.