An aging writer and pederast returns to his birthplace, Medellin. As the film develops we discover that he feels bent on self-destruction as feels that he as finished with what it is he can do in life. His self-destructive urges are piqued by a love affair with a boy hit-man. He quickly loses his moral repugnance toward the boy's frequent murders, and a dark stoicism replaces it. Early in the film we see him crying at the memory of his deceased kin, but by the end of the film he faces the deaths of those he loves with coldness and detachment. There is a stark streak of misanthropy that runs though this film. It surfaces in the protagonists repeated complaints about excessive human breeding, but it goes beyond that to include a renunciation for his own worth and of any special value in those he loves. The despondency that first seemed to comprise questioning his own life's purpose reveals itself to be a renunciation of the game of treating any life as purposeful. The protagonist's self-destructive misanthropy and the self-destructive violence of Medellin society merge, or rather come to be seen as one in the same.
Review of Our Lady of the Assassins
