Review: The mother of a missing girl can’t stop, won’t stop in harrowing thriller ‘La Civil’

Tens of thousands of people have disappeared in Mexico as a result of the ongoing drug war. That dreadful statistic has inevitably influenced the films made in or about the country. Among them, the essential, if harrowing thriller “La Civil” (Spanish for “The Civilian”), from Romanian writer-director Teodora Mihai, is a shock to the system for the moral grays of a story about an everyday person stepping into the most unthinkable abyss.

Our guide into this bleak and all-too-common reality is Cielo (Arcelia Ramírez), a housewife in northern Mexico whose teenage daughter vanishes one day. Her merciless captors soon reach out to demand a ransom, but even after complying as best as Cielo and her estranged husband can, the young girl doesn’t return home.

From the crushing impotence, a torturous fearlessness grows within the heartbroken mother. First, without any support from the authorities, she launches her own perilous investigation of the criminal organization that controls her town. When her efforts earn the attention of a military official (Jorge A. Jimenez), Cielo, now sporting a bulletproof vest, bears witness to ruthless violence in the name of justice.

But rather than exploiting her sorrow-fueled mission for a “Taken”-like revenge spectacle, the verité social drama understands Cielo’s determination to find answers not as mere courageousness, but a tragic, nothing-left-to-lose lack of concern for her own safety. She would first lose own her life than let her child’s victimizers walk away scot-free.

An actor with an extensive resume including popular soap operas, Ramírez conjures an astonishing, career-best performance so intensely laced with equal parts ravaging fury and unfathomable anguish; it consistently knocks the air out of anyone watching. Cielo undergoes an agonizing transformation of the soul, which Ramírez maps out both in her body language and by making us conscious that no matter the outcome of her devastating search, this woman won’t ever be who she was before the nightmare set in.

Executive produced by international auteurs including the Dardenne brothers and Cristian Mungiu, “La Civil” conveys an unflinching realism that lands it a distinct place among the recent wave of hard-to-watch, Mexican projects about mothers of missing people, alongside Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features” and Natalia Beristáin’s recently released “Noise.”

Mihai was originally pursing a documentary project in Mexico, but practical and security obstacles convinced her to turn to fiction, inspired by the real-life case of Miriam Rodríguez, on whom the character of Cielo is based. That the filmmaker enlisted Mexican scribe Habacuc Antonio De Rosario to co-write the screenplay likely helped ensure a nuanced reflection and avoid polluting it with a simplistically judgmental outsider’s gaze.

In Cielo’s compromised position, as she becomes unwillingly privy to the magnitude of the entrenched corruption and intimidation around her, Mihai conveys an overwhelming, nearly inescapable despair. That raw sentiment is matched by the tension in the viscerally in-the-moment camera work of Marius Panduru (Romanian director Radu Jude’s regular cinematographer), who only in the film’s ambiguous final shot offers a small ray of hope.

Late in Cielo’s ordeal, she finds herself face to face with the mother of one the young men responsible for her daughter’s kidnapping. Her counterpart, also in distress, can’t conceive why her son would be in trouble. Two mothers, on opposite sides of the road, both victims of a society tarnished by poverty and impunity, and a government incapable of solving either.