The Devil Smokes: The Horror of the Everyday
The Devil Smokes (and Keeps the Burnt Match Heads in the Same Box)
(El diablo fuma (y guarda las cabezas de los cerillos quemados en la misma caja))
Winner of the FIPRESCI Jury Prize at the 54th Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, is a Mexican film directed by Ernesto Martínez Bucio, from a screenplay co-written with Karen Plata.
Although the film is categorized as a drama —and it certainly is— we could also say that it tells a horror story, though not the kind of horror we usually associate with the genre: there are no demons, ghosts, jump scares, or killers. This film explores a more real and painful kind of horror: that of the everyday life of five siblings who face the neglect of their parents and are left under the care of a grandmother who, despite her affection, is no longer able to look after them. This story confronts us with the terror of abandonment, the lack of protection, and the insecurity that surround childhood —one of life’s most vulnerable moments.
In this film, fear inhabits the ordinary, and its consequences are the invisible wounds that life leaves behind. The story delicately touches on themes such as schizophrenia and depression —adult struggles that inevitably affect children’s lives. These five siblings learn too early to take care of themselves, of each other, and even of the adults around them. Curiously, the devil does not appear as a terrifying figure but rather as the only one capable of offering a solution to that family.
Set in the 1990s, between Pope John Paul II’s visit to Latin America and the cholera outbreak, the film —without a linear structure or a defined protagonist— presents fragments through the eyes of the children confined in their grandmother’s house, waiting for their parents to return. The mother has left them (as she had done before), and their father has gone to find her. The camera becomes a silent witness, trapped with them in a routine where time seems to stand still.
Martínez Bucio chooses to narrate through fragmentation, constructing the story from images that resemble memories: small pieces of an emotional puzzle. Everyday moments —the household chores that fall upon the older siblings, the lack of food and clean water, the constant warnings of danger that their grandmother repeats— gradually heighten the sense of helplessness. In The Devil Smokes, fear does not come from what lurks in the dark, but from what repeats itself in broad daylight.
The film belongs to a recent wave of Mexican cinema that has found in the intimate a fertile ground to explore structural and emotional violence. As in other contemporary works, what matters here is not the traumatic event itself, but its resonance. Violence takes the form of an absence: the absence of parents, of affection, of care. It is a cinema that observes without judging, allowing the viewer to reconstruct the pain from minimal gestures.
The devil, central to the title, is not portrayed as an evil being but as a symbolic, ambiguous presence that embodies the need to believe in something —anything— in order to survive. Faith, superstition, fear, and despair merge in the eyes of the children, whose only wish is for their parents to return and for things to get better.
The film echoed in my mind with a saying my grandmother used to repeat: “Better the Devil You Know Than The One You Don’t”
It speaks to the fear of the unknown, the fear of change. Perhaps what would have been best for these siblings was to receive help from social services, but faced with uncertainty, the only thing they longed for was to remain in the situation they already knew.
The contrast between the figure of the Pope and that of the devil is no coincidence: both, in opposite ways, represent hope. In a world where adults fail, any force —divine or infernal— seems better than indifference.
The result is a deeply sensory film, where emotion carries as much weight as narrative. Every frame, every pause, feels like a plea. Martínez Bucio succeeds in making the viewer not only watch but remember —their own childhood, the fear of abandonment, the helplessness in the face of sadness, the need to call upon a higher power, whether it be the Pope or the devil himself.
The Devil Smokes is a debut feature that understands that true horror does not lie in the supernatural, but in human fragility. Its power lies in what it suggests rather than what it shows —in the way it turns the familiar into something unsettling, and in how it allows each viewer, through their own memories, to complete the puzzle of fear.
By Luciana Rodríguez Díaz
Edited by David Voigt
Copyright FIPRESCI