Social Realism with Flare: Dead Man's Switch

DEAD MAN'S SWITCH / Arillo de Hombre Muerto

(Alejandro Gerber Bicecci, 2024, Mexico, 118 minutes)

Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's third feature is a social realist drama with Godardian flair. 

The story centers on subway car driver and mother of two Dalia (award-winning Mexican actress Adriana Paz), who sets out to find her husband, Esteban, when he disappears without a trace, but few people care. 

The Mexican Missing Persons system is a pervasive problem due to drug cartels, corrupt police and politicians, and a powerless populace. Plus, it shows no signs of stopping. As Carlos Aguilar wrote in The New York Times in a Feb 8, 2025 piece about the controversies swirling around Emilia Pérez, "Since 2006, over 400,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have disappeared as a result of ongoing drug-related violence across Mexico." 

With no one to assist her, Dalia turns detective, which puts her job in jeopardy, and she starts to wonder if her lover (Noé Hernández), a driver hoping to take Esteban's place, or the union opposition had something to do with it, since she and her husband were both outspoken union members. 

Hatuey Viveros Lavielle's black and white cinematography is gorgeous and inventive, and since Bicecci shot during the pandemic, streets are largely empty and the occasional face mask appears, bringing to mind the alienation of artful science fiction features, like Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville and Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo B. Ragona's 1964 The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. 

Granted, the streets are emptier at night than during the day, but that only adds to the tension, since a woman walking alone in the dark through some of Mexico City's sketchiest neighborhoods takes her life in her hands.

This is a vital subject and Adriana Paz is fantastic. Dalia is strong, sexy, and caring about her children, who have unique lives of their own--her son, who is openly gay, has recently taken a lover--and other subway car drivers. 

At Cannes 2024, Paz shared the best actress award with the cast of Emilia Pérez, which is ironic, because Jacques Audiard's embattled musical, which was shot in France, also deals with the Missing Persons system, and it's by far the inferior effort, even as it's gotten significantly more exposure, more awards consideration, and more attention overall--some of it quite scathing.

For another moving take on the subject, I would recommend Fernanda Valadez's haunting 2021 film Identifying Features, which revolves around a middle-aged mother (an excellent Mercedes Hernández) searching for her migrant worker son. Little wonder Mexican filmmakers are making the least clichéd, hardest-hitting, most personal films about this ongoing crisis.

Dead Man's Switch has been making the film festival rounds, but isn't currently available on video or streaming in the US. As Bicecci told Director's Notes, "Mexico produces around 200 features a year and a lot of colleagues can shoot their films; however, independent author driven social realist films are not exactly the easiest ones to fund, and certainly are the most difficult to distribute." I'll update this post if that changes. Images from Director's Notes (Adriana Paz), Eventival (Paz and Noé Hernández), and Mubi (Paz).