Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven is a beautifully shot, narratively confounding film that never quite gelled for me on this first viewing. The long, slow panning shots are gorgeous panoramas of life in contemporary Mexico, and our (nominal) protagonist’s malaise is highlighted by the film’s deliberate pace. The effect of all this is to create an overwhelming sense of melancholy and dread that blankets the entire film. The narrative borrows plot points from more traditional thrillers, but Reygadas doesn’t maintain an effective balance between the more pedestrian story beats and the metaphysical and spiritual concerns he wants to explore through his aesthetic choices. Confounding and frustrating as the film may be, I find something incredibly compelling about Reygadas’s stylistic choices and thematic concerns that will most certainly draw me back to this film once I’ve explored more of his filmography.