Country: Mexico / France
Review: “After Lucia” is an atmospheric drama that will not leave you indifferent. After his wife Lucia has died in a car accident, Roberto and his 17 year-old daughter Alejandra, decide to move from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City in an attempt to rebuild their lives. Once they arrive, Roberto, visibly depressed, shows incapacity to work properly, while Alejandra seems to start getting along with her new friends at school, being invited to parties where drugs, alcohol, and sex, are pretty common. In one of those parties she has a sexual adventure with Jose who used his mobile phone to record everything. The posterior publication of that video on the Internet, makes Alejandra a victim of her colleagues’ atrocities, transforming her life forever. One or two aspects could have been improved, like Roberto showing some more impatience or concern after Alejandra’s disappearance, but Franco’s discernment and self-confident direction along with the absence of emotional tricks, made the tension grow consistently as the film approaches to the disturbing finale. The spontaneous acting from the cast in general also gave credibility to a story that guaranteed my complete involvement. Presenting a strong conception and execution, “After Lucia” exposes the horrors of bullying, the inconvenience of technology, and the blindness of revenge, all in the same package.
