The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Denis Villeneuve · a film · 2015 · 121 minutes · written by Taylor Sheridan · in English and Spanish
Mode
Border thriller made with an art film’s tempo; a procedural with its true purpose withheld from its heroine and from the viewer
Mythos
Initiation and descent: an innocent taken into the underworld of the frontier by a guide who belongs to it; the revenant avenger who returns his wrong on the house of the man who did it
Phase
Weeks of an operation, from a raid in Chandler, Arizona, through a convoy into Ciudad Juárez and a tunnel at night, to a dinner at a hacienda and a football match in Juárez
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 121 minutes as released, in English with substantial Spanish; six blocks after a title card, with a Mexican policeman’s household cut into the middle of the film
Register
Dread throughout; the white glare of Arizona, dusk silhouettes, night vision and thermal images; a low pulse of score and sound beneath the picture
Scale
Three American agencies, a cartel, a Mexican policeman and his son, and the border as one place
Governing Proposition
An FBI agent is recruited to a task force whose purpose no one will tell her, and learns in a tunnel under the border that she was wanted for her name on a page. The wager of the film is that the war it shows is not the enforcement of law but the management of violence, that the law is needed there only as cover, and that a thriller can say so by taking its story away from its conscience once the conscience has signed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a title card that defines its own name, the word for a hired killer, and leaves open which of its characters the word will name. Then a house in Chandler, Arizona, white in the desert glare. An FBI kidnap-response team led by Kate Macer breaks in, and behind the drywall finds bodies sealed in the walls. In a shed behind the house a bomb goes off and kills two officers. What is found kills: that is the first instance of the law the film will keep.
Kate, played by Emily Blunt, is recruited from that afternoon. Matt Graver, played by Josh Brolin in flip-flops and with an ease that is the operation’s face, takes her into his task force as a volunteer. Her superior is Dave Jennings, played by Victor Garber, and her partner Reggie Wayne, played by Daniel Kaluuya. She is not told where the task force is going, and the film does not tell the viewer either.
Denis Villeneuve directed the film from an original screenplay by Taylor Sheridan. Roger Deakins photographed it, Joe Walker edited it, Jóhann Jóhannsson wrote the music and Patrice Vermette designed it. It premiered in competition at Cannes on 19 May 2015 and was released in the United States by Lionsgate from 18 September 2015, at 121 minutes, in English with substantial Spanish. It received three Academy Award nominations, for cinematography, original score and sound editing, and won none.
Movement II
The task force goes into Ciudad Juárez to bring a cartel figure, Guillermo Díaz, back across the border. With it goes Alejandro, a quiet man played by Benicio del Toro, whose part in the operation Kate is not told. The convoy of black vehicles crosses the city in formation, and Jóhannsson’s low pulse runs beneath it. The city is seen from the air as a grid of quiet, and from the road as a place where bodies hang under an overpass and the convoy drives past them.
On the way back the convoy halts in the jammed lanes at the border crossing, among ordinary cars, and the guns come out in what is in effect a car park of ordinary traffic. Walker cuts the approach slowly and the eruption exactly.
The sequence teaches Kate, and the viewer, what the operation is before anyone names it. It discloses without a word what the film’s thesis will later state: that at this frontier the state’s agents and the cartel use one method. Kate sees it as a witness, and the camera stays with what she can see; she has not yet understood that the law is not the point.
Movement III
Kate and Reggie follow the money, the cartel’s cash and its banks. In a bar Kate meets Ted, played by Jon Bernthal, and the evening ends in a strangling that Alejandro interrupts. The scene is the film’s most engineered, built to put her in danger and to deliver a clue in the bands on the cartel’s cash, and it could be cut with small loss.
Then the tunnel. The team walks down into the dark at dusk, against an orange sky, figures in silhouette until the horizon takes them, and the passage underground is shown in night vision and thermal, images chosen for what the viewer may know. There Kate learns what she was recruited for: the operation belongs to the CIA, it is running on American soil, and she, an FBI agent, is its legal cover.
In the tunnel the film leaves her. She is shot in her vest and left behind, and the camera follows Alejandro into Mexico. The change of point of view is the argument made into structure: once the conscience has supplied what the operation needed, it is removed from the story, and the film goes on without it.
Movement IV
Through the middle of the film, in short scenes, Villeneuve has cut in a Mexican policeman, Silvio, played by Maximiliano Hernández, with his wife and his son. The scenes seem to belong to another film, and the film’s Mexico is almost wholly seen from the American vehicle; this household is its only inside, and it is a sketch. But the thread is placed with care, and it is paid.
Alejandro, alone now, takes Silvio, kills him on a roadside, and has Manuel Díaz drive him to the hacienda of Fausto Alarcón, the cartel’s head. As Graver tells it, Alejandro was a lawyer whose wife and daughter were killed on the order of the man he now goes to find. He has returned from that as an instrument, and the operation has used him as one.
Alarcón is at dinner with his wife and two sons. The scene is quiet and absolute. Alejandro kills the wife and the boys and then Alarcón. The climax of the thriller is a family dinner, and the revenge is the crime done to Alejandro returned on the family of the man who ordered it. The title card’s word has found the character it names.
Movement V
Alejandro comes to Kate’s apartment, and she signs. That is the film’s real climax, quieter than the dinner and more exact: the signature is what she was for. The phrase “land of wolves” names the order she cannot enter. She has a gun, and she cannot fire it.
The film has denied its heroine the act a thriller owes her. She signs; she does not shoot. The denial is not a lapse of the writing but its point, planted from the first meeting, when she was not told where she was going. The cost is that the person who carries the point is thinly drawn, a competence and a conscience with little else, and the film pays that cost knowingly.
The last scene is in Juárez. Silvio’s son plays football; gunfire sounds beyond the pitch; the boys stop, listen, and play on. The bodies in the walls at Chandler and this pause on a pitch are the two most distant points of the film, and one law governs both: violence is the material of the place, sealed into its houses and heard at its games. The last image belongs to a child Kate never meets.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the film holds. The Chandler raid is required: the bodies in the walls are why Kate volunteers, and the shed bomb that kills two officers is the first instance of the film’s law, that what is found kills. The Juárez convoy teaches her, and us, what the operation is before anyone names it. The scenes of Silvio, which look like digressions, are the counterweight: the man killed on a roadside has a son, and the coda pays the thread. The tunnel gives the turn, and the signature closes it. What gives: Ted’s bar scene is engineered to endanger Kate and deliver a clue, and Graver’s explanations in the last third say aloud what the convoy and the tunnel showed.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The war on drugs, as the film shows it, is not the enforcement of law but the management of violence, and its aim is to restore one cartel’s monopoly with which a state can deal. The law is needed only as cover: an FBI agent is recruited so that a CIA operation can run at home, and her conscience is valuable to it as a signature. That mechanism is disclosed in structure, by what Kate is not told and when she learns it. At the frontier the state’s agents and the cartel use the same means. The image discloses without words: the bodies under the overpass, Juárez from the air as a grid of quiet. What holds it from the top: part of the thesis is spoken by Graver, and Mexico is seen from the American vehicle.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The register is dread, and the film rises in it repeatedly. The Juárez convoy: black vehicles in formation crossing the city over Jóhann Jóhannsson’s low pulse, the bodies hanging under the overpass, and the halt in the jammed lanes at the crossing, where the guns come out among ordinary traffic. The tunnel descent: the team walking down into the dark against an orange sky, figures in silhouette until the horizon takes them, the most elevated image in the film; then the passage underground in night vision and thermal. Alarcón’s dinner, quiet and absolute. The coda, gunfire beyond a football pitch and the boys’ pause, a small sublime of indifference. Held at its figure because the elevation is of one kind, and the investigative scenes at the middle are level.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built into the plot, and it bears the load. An innocent is taken from the known country into the underworld of the frontier, guided by a figure who belongs to it; she goes literally under the earth in the tunnel and returns knowing and unmade. Alejandro is the revenant avenger, a lawyer whose wife and daughter were killed, as Graver tells it, returned as the instrument of vengeance, and the dinner turns the crime done to him on the family of the man who ordered it. The descent and the reversal are the film’s structure, not its decoration. What holds it below the gate: the wolf, in “land of wolves”, is a line rather than a construction, Kate’s descent stops at witness rather than transformation, and the avenger is a figure the western and the revenge film already knew.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is the narco and border thriller: Traffic (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), the procedural of Michael Mann, and the paramilitary realism of Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The turns are real and they compound. The protagonist is moved to the edge of her own film, and the last act is given to a character whose interior is never entered. The climax is not a firefight but a family dinner that ends in the shooting of two boys. The heroine signs and does not shoot, and the last image belongs to a Mexican child she never meets. Sound and tempo are the art film’s, not the action film’s. What holds it: the stake was a mid-budget picture with stars, the ideas were in the air, and the procedural with a hidden purpose is a proven path.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. For two thirds of its length the camera holds to Kate’s knowledge: she is told little and driven where she is driven, and the viewer learns what the operation is when she does, in the tunnel. The sound does the same work, a pressure under the image that tells the body what the mind has not been given. Then the form breaks on purpose. In the tunnel the film leaves Kate, shot in her vest and left behind, and follows Alejandro into Mexico. That change of point of view is the argument made structural: the conscience is removed from the story once its signature is secured. An omniscient form would lose the knowledge that the observer is an instrument. Held from the top because the handover is also a seam, and outside it the grammar is the procedural’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Eleven years are short evidence, so the figure is partly forecast, and that is what holds it among the lowest. The film already yields on return, and the yield is formal: the sound under the image, the rhyme of the bodies under the overpass with the bodies in the walls at Chandler, the placing of the Silvio scenes, the signature recognised as the real climax. Questions stay open and are argued: whether the film endorses Alejandro’s method or only discloses it, whether Kate’s passivity is the film’s knowledge or a failure of its writing, how far Mexico is reduced to ground. Against it: much of the writing on the film is craft study and political commentary rather than new reading, and the thesis is legible at a first viewing and does not much deepen.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film is a concentrated model of the serious genre picture of its decade, a thriller with an art film’s tempo, a dread led by sound, and a refusal of catharsis, and that model was taken up. It does not reorganise what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Taylor Sheridan’s career followed from it, with Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017), the three films often read as a frontier set; it led to a sequel; it was the step to Villeneuve’s larger films with Roger Deakins and Joe Walker; and its score is often said to have set the sound of later thrillers and trailers, a lineage widely asserted and thinly documented. The reach lies in genre, scoring and careers, not in the form of film.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on eleven years, and under thirteen years a work stands at 7.9 or below. The film survives whole as released, at 121 minutes, born digital in its delivery, with nothing lost. Its presence has been wide and continuous: theatrical success, three Academy Award nominations, home video, streaming and television, and a sequel. Its surface is somewhat fixed to its moment: the drug-war policy debate of the early 2010s, the Juárez violence of around 2010, the tactical gear and night-vision look of its period. Wide presence and whole survival place it near the top of what eleven years allow, and the topical surface keeps it a tenth below. None of this is survival in the axis’s full sense; it is the beginning of it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight throughout. Roger Deakins’ light runs from the white glare of Arizona to the tunnel’s dusk silhouettes and the thermal and night-vision images, each chosen for what the viewer may know. Joe Walker cuts the convoy slow in the approach and exact in the eruption. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score and the sound design carry the dread the dialogue withholds, and Patrice Vermette’s frontier is built and found. Benicio del Toro’s stillness lets the dinner work; Emily Blunt plays a competence held under pressure until it gives; Josh Brolin’s ease is the operation’s face. The costs: the writing is less exact than the image, and the handover of the last act is managed more by plot than by craft. Below Chinatown and The Third Man, whose screenplays bear as much as their images.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bodies sealed in the walls of a suburban house in Arizona, and the boys’ football match in Juárez that stops for gunfire and goes on. One law governs both: violence is the material of the place, sealed into its houses and heard at its games, and what people do is live inside it. The convoy, the tunnel and the dinner obey the same law: the state’s agents and the cartel use one method, and the frontier dissolves the difference. The tone holds from the title card to the last frame, and the Silvio scenes obey the main plot’s law from the other side of the line. What holds it: the range is narrow, one register with almost no comedy or warmth to test the law against, and Ted’s scene and Graver’s explanations bend toward a thriller’s conventions.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held: the state, in three agencies, the Mexican police, the rules of jurisdiction and the paper that legalises; the economy, in the drug trade’s cash, its banks and its routes; the family, in Silvio’s household, Alarcón’s dinner table and Alejandro’s destroyed family, held as one chain of consequence; consciousness, in Kate, whose conscience is the film’s thread; and the border as a political and physical place, with the desert as its ground. The plot integrates them: the cash, the tunnel, the policeman and the family are one operation, and for a two-hour thriller the range is real. What holds it among the lowest: consciousness is Kate’s surface and Alejandro’s mask and no further, Mexico is seen from outside, and labour and the sacred are absent.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.6, then The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.3. A making in which light, cutting, score and performance carry the dread the dialogue withholds; a structure in which the raid, the convoy, the tunnel, the dinner and the policeman’s son are each required; elevation in one register, dread, reached again and again; and one law, violence as the material of the place, from the walls at Chandler to the pitch in Juárez.
Limiting Dimension
The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 7.6: eleven years of return are short evidence, the film’s depth is formal more than semantic, and the orders it holds stop at Kate’s surface and Alejandro’s mask, with Mexico seen from outside. Above them, The Swerve at 7.7, a set of real turns on a proven path at a moderate stake, and The Imperishable at 7.8, the beginning of survival rather than its proof.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, The Imperishable at 7.8 and The Swerve at 7.7 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five conditions hold. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate and by its aggregate, 8.1 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sicario as released in 2015, the theatrical cut of 121 minutes, in English with substantial Spanish, from the title card to the football match in Juárez: directed by Denis Villeneuve from an original screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, photographed by Roger Deakins, edited by Joe Walker, with music by Jóhann Jóhannsson and production design by Patrice Vermette, with Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal, Victor Garber and Maximiliano Hernández; premiered in competition at Cannes on 19 May 2015 and released in the United States by Lionsgate from 18 September 2015. The sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), directed by Stefano Sollima, is not part of the work. No print, screenplay or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where certain, in one phrase. Details that could not be verified, among them the aspect ratio, the number and timing of the Silvio scenes, scene and shot counts, exact dialogue and secondary locations, are not given.