LA ZONA

Directed by Rodrigo Plá. Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdú, Alan Chávez, Daniel Tovar Club, IFI, Dublin, 97 min

IT'S HARD to think of a recent film - or, at least, a good one - that begins with a sequence of such clunky portentousness as that which opens this angry drama set in Mexico City.

The camera follows a butterfly as it makes its way across an exclusive gated community and towards the barrier that separates the doctors and lawyers from starving hoi polloi. The creature lands on a strip of electrified wire and is cruelly vaporised. Do you get it? Do you? It's a metaphor, you see.

Happily, La Zona, though it has its problems, never again exhibits that degree of clumsiness. The action, which has the shape of a mystery, begins with an elderly lady discovering burglars in her house and - it takes us a while to discover precisely how - being brutally murdered.

The next morning a security guard is also found dead and the residents in the complex begin considering their options. Afraid of losing the right to police their own property, they elect to cover-up the incident and hunt down the murderers themselves.

I beg your pardon? That decision doesn't really make any sense. After all, this is not an Agatha Christie story in which all the suspects are contained in the same isolated vicarage. There is a shantytown full of potential villains just over the fence.

Set that logical absurdity aside, however, and you should enjoy an effective blend of sociopolitical drama and tense, tightly structured thriller. Rodrigo Plá, making his feature debut, offers us a pessimistic view of Mexican society in which the poor scrabble for survival and the rich sacrifice freedom and decency for the sake of a quiet life.

When a teenage inhabitant of the zone encounters a burglar, those dynamics are explored in a fashion that never slips into triteness or sentimentality. Indeed, it beggars belief that the same man who shot the stupid butterfly directed the film's searing, properly sombre finale.