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We know from the opening shot, in which a young man gazes forlornly at a wall-sized mural of an impossibly beautiful outdoor setting, that the weighty yet poignant Sin Nombre is going to be a movie about yearning — yearning for that which we cannot have. It is a movie about the wages of sin that come back to claim their own, indifferent to redemption, especially a redemption bathed in blood.

Like Maria Full of Grace, Sin Nombre is the story of a young immigrant woman who must make choices she never anticipated in order just to stay alive. Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a teenager living in squalor in Honduras, dreams of a brighter future in America. When her long-estranged father appears and offers to escort her through Mexico and into the United States where he has begun a new life with a new family, she timidly agrees.

Casper (Edgar Flores) is a member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in Tapachula, Mexico, a murderous brotherhood who settle territorial disputes with machetes and homemade guns. Their leader is a remorseless psychopath named Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), a man whose face and chest are tattooed, like a berserker Pict warrior, with permanent war paint. In one scene, he oversees the assassination of a groveling prisoner while cooing adoringly in his tiny infant’s ear. He is malevolence incarnate. And Casper, a fiend himself, is about to cross him.

To close the distance between Mexico’s southern and northern borders, hundreds of immigrants ride what is known as the “train of death.” The ominously named locomotive arrives (accompanied by a dread-full score by composer Marcelo Zarvos) in the dark of night, belching acrid smoke, half obscuring headlamps lit like bestial eyes. It is spectral, a thing of menace, a modern, metallic incarnation of Charon’s boat bid to take the dead across the river Styx and into hell. The immigrants gathered in the train yard to catch it ride not inside, but atop the cars. Their journey through the Mexican countryside will be long and full of hardship. Crossing the border into the United States is far from the most difficult leg of their long journey.

It is here that Sayra meets Casper. While she is fleeing toward her future, he is fleeing from his past. He regards himself with the same repugnance that his fellow travelers regard him, but somehow the young woman sees the good in the young man that he thought he’d banished long ago. Over her father’s frightened and vehement protestations, Sayra finds herself inexplicably allied to Casper. She too is terrified of Casper at first, but comes to see him as her dark guardian angel, a demonic savior. As the train threads its way northward, Casper and Sayra navigate the emotional gauntlet of their unlikely friendship. But as much as Sin Nombre is a drama of emotions, it is also a chase film. Casper’s sins follow him in the form of tattooed wraiths. His vengeful gang tightens the noose around his neck the nearer he and Sayra draw toward freedom.

Sin Nombre, which had its world-premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, was written and directed by Student Academy Award winner Cary Joji Fukunaga. Sin Nombre represents his blistering feature debut. An American, Fukunaga road the train of death for months to prepare for this film and his intimate research shows in each and every powerful frame.

Sin Nombre is dense with powerful images that stick with you long after you leave the theater. There are moments of great beauty such as the landscape washing by like smeared watercolors, and there is harrowing ugliness as when 12-year-old Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer), Casper’s protégée, transforms from an innocent to a devil right before our eyes. Sin Nombre ends the only way it can end, in tears and blood. And yet, never far from the tragedy is the irrepressible hope birthed in the crucible of desperation. Sin Nombre, in spite of or perhaps even because of its heartbreak, is a buoyant and beautiful hymn to life.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.