Sicario (2015)
Denis Villeneuve arrived at Sicario in 2015 off the back of a run of films that had established him as one of the more serious-minded directors working in mainstream American cinema. After the Quebec-set domestic drama Incendies (2010) and the missing-child thriller Prisoners (2013, and a film I also reviewed on the site), he had built a reputation for films that treat their audiences as adults, willing to sit in discomfort and moral ambiguity without rushing toward easy resolution. Sicario, produced by Lionsgate and Black Label Media through Thunder Road, fits that pattern precisely. Taylor Sheridan, then still relatively new to screenwriting (this came before Hell or High Water and long before Yellowstone became a television institution), handed Villeneuve a script rooted in the political and human mess of the US-Mexico border drug war. The result is a film that wears its genre conventions, action thriller, procedural, moral fable, lightly enough that you only notice how carefully they have been assembled once the credits roll.
The story follows Kate Macer, an FBI agent recruited into a shadowy government task force whose methods and objectives grow murkier the further she is drawn in. It is a classic outsider-perspective structure, familiar from crime fiction, used here to filter an overwhelming subject down to something personal and increasingly unsettling. Emily Blunt carries that function with considerable skill, her performance controlled and physically committed, the character's confusion and alarm kept internal rather than telegraphed. Alongside her, Benicio del Toro brings a quality that is difficult to put a name to, something watchful and worn and quietly menacing, and Josh Brolin plays the kind of easy-grinning government operative who makes you more nervous the more relaxed he seems. Victor Garber and Jon Bernthal round out a cast that, on paper, reads like a wish list. For a companion piece in terms of moral murkiness and Border-country atmosphere, the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men shares something of the same bone-dry, violence-is-ordinary register, and I wrote about that one too.
The craft behind the camera is where Sicario genuinely distinguishes itself. Roger Deakins, working here with a palette of bleached yellows and deep shadow, uses the landscape almost architecturally, the vast flatness of the border region making every human figure look exposed and provisional. His use of aerial wide shots, placing convoys of vehicles against the immensity of the terrain, is one of the more memorable visual choices in the film, and it recurs with enough consistency to function as a kind of visual argument about power and smallness. The cutting is shared between Joe Walker and Mary Lukasiewicz, and Walker in particular would go on to collaborate with Villeneuve again on Arrival and Dune, films I also covered here (Arrival (2016) and Dune (2021)). The editing in Sicario manages a tricky tonal balance, slow and patient in the first half, then tight and percussive once the film shifts register. Jóhann Jóhannsson's score works in low, droning frequencies, less melodic than atmospheric, more a physical presence than a traditional soundtrack, the kind of music that sits in your chest rather than your ear.
Sicario is, among other things, one of the best-looking thrillers of its decade. The cinematography, courtesy of the great Roger Deakins, is the standout: all vast, sun-scorched border vistas and tense, shadowed interiors, and it is an undeniably stunning film simply to sit and look at.
It is stacked with talent, too. Emily Blunt anchors it, with Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin and Jon Bernthal among a seriously strong supporting cast.
At its core it is a revenge story, set against the grim backdrop of the South American drug trade and the war being waged along the US-Mexico border. A word of warning, though: the opening act takes its time, with long, deliberate stretches where not a lot seems to happen. Stick with it. That patience is laying groundwork, and once the film shifts gears it does not let up.
Because the back half is almost wall-to-wall set pieces, one tense, expertly staged sequence after another. The action is handled superbly, taut and muscular and gripping, and Villeneuve shoots it all with the cold precision that has become his trademark. There is a video-game quality to some of it; if Call of Duty ever made a film, I suspect it would look and feel a lot like this, and I mean that as a compliment to the craft rather than a dig.
If it falls short of greatness, it is mostly down to that front-loaded slowness, and to a story that, underneath all the tension, is simpler than it first appears. But as a piece of pure craft, a thing to watch and be gripped by, it more than delivers. Three and a half stars, a lean, handsome and ferociously tense thriller, and comfortably worth the patience it asks of you early on.
Sicario sits comfortably in the upper tier of Villeneuve's filmography, the point at which his instincts for unease and formal precision found a subject perfectly suited to both. Sheridan's script, the performances, and the film's visual and sonic identity all pull in the same direction: a world in which the machinery of state violence operates just far enough out of sight that those inside it can maintain the fiction of purpose. Whether that adds up to a complete artistic statement or a very well-executed genre exercise is, perhaps, the more interesting question the film leaves behind. Some films are better for raising the question than answering it.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-10-20
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Sicario (2015) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Lionsgate+ Amazon Channel
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