‘Un varón (A Male)’ Review – A Potent Portrait Of Masculinity That’s Missing Something

It’s Christmas time in Bogota and Carlos (Dilan Felipe Ramírez Espitia) who lives in a boarding house, wants to spend the holiday with his incarcerated mother and his older sister. He is surrounded by dominant and “macho” men, who only believe in one way of being a man. Outside, Carlos conforms to this stereotype, but inside he knows it’s not who he is. The struggle to maintain the facade gets harder to do as he’s faced with the day-to-day struggles of the streets that are riddled with crime, gangs, and rampant violence. In Fabian Hernandez’s debut film, he takes us inside the life of a 16-year-old boy, who has to fight everything about himself just to survive.

Right away, Dilan Felipe Ramirez Espitia is excellent casting. He’s convincing as a hardened teenager, but just as convincing as a scared kid. The film doesn’t go much into Carlos’s background. We don’t know why his mother is locked away, and it’s not clear what his sister does for work, but it appears to be very dangerous. You get the sense that he was forced into the situation he’s in now, having to live in the boarding house. Everyone there is the epitome of toxic masculinity. The film opens with one of the boys talking about who they prefer to hang out with. One of whom flatly states, “no weirdos and no f******s”.

The implication being that Carlos might be homosexual. This notion continues to creep up throughout the film when Carlos finds himself alone in a room with a willing woman and is hesitant to perform. If Carlos’s sexuality is a factor, it’s never explicitly stated. There’s another moment later in the film where Carlos is confronted by a gang member who threatens to either kill him or sexually assault him. In both instances, the camera cuts away before the action is completed. We’re left to wonder if either of these instances went the way they were looking. 

It’s because of this that Hernandez’s film ends up feeling incomplete. He presents this character as someone who feels the need to show he’s a man, without fully knowing what it means, and he’s got all the worst examples to look at. Carlos’s only stated goal is to get to be with his family. In order to do that, he’s got to sell drugs on the street to get enough for his mother’s bond. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t spend enough time on Carlos’s goals. When his sister goes missing, he goes in search of her and finds himself in more trouble, where he has to prove his manhood in the only way the streets will accept. Espitia is especially good at internalizing this conflict. He understands the implications of his actions, but also sees little escape from them. He’s in an impossible situation and he knows it.

The issue here is the film is directed like a documentary. It gets close to its subjects but never too close, and the camera behaves as if it can’t be in the room at the same time as the characters, even though it very easily can. It leaves too many things ambiguous that it ends up not saying anything. There’s a moment where Carlos and his gang leader, Freddy (Jhonathan Steven Rodríguez) come across a man who used to hang out with Freddy and his crew but left to be a father. Freddy tries to coerce him into coming back, and he resists.

This moment should feel essential to Carlos in both what he wants and a future he could have, but the film doesn’t engage with this moment further. There’s no reflection on it by Carlos or anyone else. It just passes. It’s the kind of moment that’s left up to viewer interpretation, which would be fine if there weren’t so many moments like that in the film. 

The final frame takes a good five minutes to end the film, and it’s just Carlos agonizing over the decision he now has to make. You understand his anguish, but you also wish there was more happening in that moment than that. We don’t know what happened in the room with the woman, or what happened in the room with the guy who wanted to assault him, and we don’t know what’s going to happen at this moment either, and we never find out. There’s nothing wrong with leaving a few things vague, but you’ve got to give us something eventually.

Un varón (A Male) is the Colombian submission for Best International Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards. The film is currently playing in select theaters in San Diego with additional markets to follow. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TGe8_EgY8c]