Kai (Garcia Bernal) mysteriously appears from a river and shows up on a small family farm. He is instantly taken with the farmer's daughter, Vania (Alice Braga), and vows to help them defend their farm against evil mercenaries out to drive them away in the service of corporate developers. Things go poorly for the simple farm people and, after plenty of rather arbitrary back and forth in the jungle, some mild mysticism and the looming presence of a revered jaguar, Kai and Vania end up back on the farm for a down and dirty Western finale, which would be a lot more fun if the muddled and tiresome road to get there didn't drain the plot of its urgency.
It's hard to make an ugly film in the jungle and the imagery is often beautiful, notably every time the jaguar is on screen. Director Pablo Fendrik stages two provocative farm set pieces to bookend the central jungle moments; a major opening scene is hauntingly lit (if not literally then in the world of the movie) entirely by campfire, while the climax is shrouded in unrelenting smoke. Both are examples of powerful imagery, but the latter ends up feeling too self-conscious, too deliberately cinematic, to really grip.
And that's exactly the problem with the rest of the movie. It strives so hard to be transcendent that it has no real soul. What is presumably intended to play as mystical and enigmatic tends to be more opaque and unclear. Braga does fine with the thin part she is given, but Garcia seems lost, grasping at straws to create a character that has very little substance.
Although the film is admirably spare on dialogue, the hardest thing to sit through is every single line spoken. A combination of stiff writing and over-wrought delivery constantly emphasize the film's artifice when instead we should be invested in a visceral fight for survival. It can't be the fault of the actors when every line uttered - from throwaway exposition to musings on the mysteries of the jungle - is punctuated by epic pauses and pronounced accentuation, presumably in a pointless quest for profundity. Sadly, Fendrik's vaguely mystical jungle western is a wasted opportunity.
