Los demonios de amanecer (Demons at Dawn)

Los demonios de amanecer (Demons at Dawn), dir. Julián Hernández, 2024 Mexico, 136 min., in Spanish with English subtitles 💩

Sunday, June 23, 2024, Roxie U.S. premiere

not available in the Digital Screening Room streaming encore

⚠️Content advisory: contains multiple graphic depictions of simulated sex

Los demonios de amanecer
(Demons at Dawn)
Luís Vegas & Axel Shuarma

We’re in Mexico City. Orlando (Luís Vegas) is a dance student, hoping to become a professional dancer and/or singer, but working as a go-go boy in a gay club while also living with his parents and sharing a bedroom with his brother. Marco (Axel Shuarma) is a nursing student who has just gotten his first apartment as he gets close to graduation. The two begin a hot and steamy affair. Then some things happen that derail their fairytale romance — the metaphorical “demons at dawn” — but I couldn’t give you spoilers if I wanted to, because the film never really lets us know what happened, let alone why. Orlando especially is unable to articulate what is happening, leading to a repetitive series of exchanges of “¿Qué pasó? No sé. ¿Qué pasó? No sé. ¿Qué pasó? No sé. ¿Qué pasó? No sé. ¿Qué pasó? No sé.” (“What happened? I don’t know.”) Marco is almost as inexpressive. At the end, there is a (dream?) sequence that suddenly cuts off the loose threads (I can’t really say they are in any sense tied together), but in a resoundingly unsatisfying way.

Julián Hernández and I clearly have fundamentally different ideas of storytelling, in that I believe that part of the act of storytelling is the actual telling of the story. If the characters themselves can’t tell us what is going on, the filmmaker can still show us, but Hernández consciously chose not to, leaving it to the audience to interpolate from fragments of story. Thus, metaphorically speaking, about two thirds of the way through, the story goes off the rails and around the bend, over the woods and through the hills, finally magically appearing at a station halfway across the city. The last third of the film is utterly useless, unless you really like watching twinks sulk and brood.

I saw and disliked Hernández’s two previous Frameline films, the short Bramadero (2008, Worldly Affairs at Frameline32) and the feature film La huella de unos labios (The Trace of Your Lips) (2023, Frameline47), which exhibited similar failures by the filmmaker to actually tell a story, although at least this time around the sexy scenes were actually sexy. Still, on the principle of “three strikes, you’re out,” I am not inclined to give Hernández any more chances.

Bottom line: if you’re really into a sexy story of two very good-looking Mexican twinks (Vegas is hot, but Shuarma looks like a teen idol pop superstar, easily “the cute one” in any boy band), then you should watch about the first hour and a half and then turn it off. On the other hand, you could just watch the trailer, which contains most of the good parts of the film. Otherwise, don’t waste your time on this sad excuse for a film. Enthusiastically NOT RECOMMENDED.

Bizarre footnote: the IMDb page for the film lists neither of the stars in the cast, besides giving a ridiculous summary of the plot: “As the boys go against a diverse, ever-changing, hostile world, they'll learn that once the darkness of night is gone and through their intertwined bodies and their synchronized souls, they will have seen all those demons of dawn go by.”

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