By Steve Erickson

Stillz’s Barrio Triste transforms the dangers of life in Medellín into a haunting journey through cosmic horror, media distrust, and adolescent fear.

Barrio Triste, directed by Stillz. Available on VOD on October 6.

A scene from Barrio Triste. Photo: EDGLRD

A camera roams a poor neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia, as though it were an independent consciousness. From the beginning, we are given an explanation for what it sees: several teenagers are using it to film themselves. The question of who is holding the camera soon becomes the greater mystery. The footage treats the city as though it were a maze. Pondering rooftop graffiti, the camera takes in crude drawings of sex and mystical portents. Any resemblance to the cinematic tradition of neorealism is immediately trashed. When the final half hour arrives, Barrio Triste enters truly audacious territory: cosmic horror touches down in Medellín.

We initially see a journalist, his suit and tie marking him as an outsider, warily pacing by himself. He has come to Barrio Triste to record a broadcast about mysterious lights in the neighborhood; they are alleged to have descended from the sky into the street. The camera jumps around, refusing to center the reporter in the frame. Before he can proceed, he is robbed by four teenagers lingering in the background, who take his camera. Afterward, they rob a jewelry store, killing the manager. This murder breaks up the monotony of a long car ride, during which they listen to a man claiming to be a serial killer call in to a talk-radio program. After this point, the narrative fragments and dissolves.

Barrio Triste is the third film produced by Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD company. This effort is more earnest than Korine’s own work. The camera-eye perspective and the directorial push toward abstract extremes of light and color evoke Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void and Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3. That said, Stillz lacks Korine and Noé’s penchant for depending on shock value and transgression. Early scenes set one up for a degree of violence — which does not materialize. Aside from a few gory images, Barrio Triste cares more about the psychological effects of living with violence than about physical confrontations. In this sense, it mutates away from the genre of extreme cinema it initially resembles.

Although Barrio Triste is Stillz’s first film, he is a prolific music-video director specializing in Latin pop and música urbana. (He has made 26 Bad Bunny videos.) Venezuelan producer Arca’s score reaches assaultive extremes. She signals that a robbery is about to take place with bursts of harsh noise. Stillz’s video for her song “Chama” showed that he was already thinking about the impact of images of bright light.

Treating poverty as a mood as much as a reality poses enormous dangers, but Barrio Triste never feels as though it were made by a slumming social worker. Films about poor people in the Global South often suffocate viewers with their good intentions, maintaining a troubling distance from the communities they use as subjects. Barrio Triste gives several characters monologues on the attractions of suicide and the fleeting nature of happiness. Their grim material conditions are emotionally oppressive, flattening affect. Stillz also appears to share his characters’ disdain for the media; at one point, one character stomps a radio to bits after listening to a news report. The characters here do not appreciate being treated like curiosities; Barrio Triste tries to reflect their despairing state of mind.

Stillz served as his own cinematographer. While the camera movements often look random, there is always a logic behind them. Out-of-focus images suddenly clear up to reveal something in the distance. The screen turns completely white for a brief second. Stillz’s framing draws our attention to a meter-high pile of trash bags, then to a punk band rehearsing on a crumbling balcony. The extremely shaky handheld camera cranks up an omnipresent nervous tension. Despite touches of quasi-documentary naturalism, the colors are distorted, to the point that even mundane scenes foreshadow the hallucinatory surrealism of later ones. The street glows bright red. The central mystery of the UAP, if that is what it is, distorts our ability to make sense of the images we see. By the time an hour has passed, the film has entered a realm that is slanted toward the internalized, even as the camera continues to wander in the external world.

Barrio Triste retains the emphasis on vibes found in Korine’s two features for EDGLRD, but it is it is more mature and empathetic. The director, who grew up in Medellín, told Variety, “It’s a way of me visualizing what it felt like as a kid hearing those stories [of kidnapping and other crimes].” Barrio Triste comes across as a way of processing those traumatic  experiences — but through fantasy. The genre touches are not for the sake of escapism, but rather a way to suggest how horribly bleak circumstances can force one to long, in desperation, for any exit.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here. He presents a biweekly freeform radio show, Radio Not Radio, featuring an eclectic selection of music from around the world.