Sicario

My journey into Denis Villeneuve's filmography has been a great experience and a reminder of how dedicated he is to his work, ensuring that he never makes the same film twice. Prisoners, Arrival and Bladerunner 2049 have stood out among the best of the years that they were released, and the same was said of Sicario. This time Villeneuve creates a dark and gritty voyage beyond the Mexican borders where idealistic FBI agent, Emily Blunt, joins a government task force operation to deal with the war on drugs.

Villeneuve starts the story with a familiar team-up of various groups coming together to enter Juarez and extract key targets, all lead by John Brolin with an ominously silent Benicio Del Toro in support. Blunt sees this as an opportunity to make a difference for her country but her perception starts to change as they cross the border and things become a lot more murky.

This had all the trappings of your typical Hollywood guns-a-blazing action flick but Villeneuve brings new life to a genre with an unsettling sense of fear and dread that something in not as it seems. He twists the genre around, keeps the audience guessing and once again proves what a key asset he is to the industry, making me wish I saw this in the cinema. The soundtrack by Jóhann Jóhannsson and Roger Deakins' cinematography brilliantly add to this unnerving experience, but of all of Villeneuve's 'mainstream' films I think this will be his most divisive.

Sicario is a film I will try to watch again but the grimness will not suit all audiences as it explores an ongoing war that hurts so many people. But that is more to cast and crew's excellent work, and hopefully what Villeneuve has achieved here won't be undone by its action-packed sequel Sicario 2: Soldado.