True Detective: Night Country creator’s breakout horror film will ruin you

polygon.com:

Before she crafted the icy horror of True Detective: Night Country, showrunner Issa López made her mark with a wrenching horror fable about children facing off against human traffickers. Released in 2017, Tigers Are Not Afraid would become the writer-director’s calling card, a bleak horror-fantasy that established López’s knack for atmosphere and revealing characters via the things they dread. It also broke my damn heart.

Set in an unnamed Mexican city, Tigers Are Not Afraid follows Estrella (Paola Lara), a young girl we meet in a moment of terrible violence. As her schoolteacher lectures the class about fairy tales, gunfire erupts outside, and in an effort to comfort Estrella, her teacher offers her three pieces of chalk and says they are three wishes. Across the film’s 83 minutes, Estrella will use those three wishes, to horrible effect. Orphaned shortly after receiving them, her mother presumably abducted by the human trafficking ring known as The Huascas, what choice does she have?

Tigers Are Not Afraid is an unsparing film. It is about kids struggling with horrible things that have happened and will happen to them, things that they do not fully understand yet must accept and struggle through anyway. As Estrella falls in with a group of orphans that have been similarly victimized by The Huascas (and the politician that secretly backs them), she contemplates how to use her wishes for survival, and recoils at the unintended consequences that come from using them — like Estrella’s mother haunting her as a ghost following a wish that she return. Throughout, Tigers Are Not Afraid injects its gritty crime tragedy with a touch of fairy tale magic; sometimes to underline the innocence of the orphan gang, and other times to provide glimpses at the supernatural world Estrella believes she is haunted by.

Children, as the film’s sometimes messy but effective script underlines over and over again, have a sense of clarity that the world makes them pay for. Estrella and her