A pretty girl in Tijuana enters a beauty pageant and thereby finds herself caught in a world of drugs, guns and corruption in Miss Bala, a drama about the crime and violence available in contemporary Mexico.
Based on a real-life incident, Miss Bala (translation: Miss Bullet) concerns Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a teenager who skips school one day to sign up for the Miss Baja California competition. She goes with her best friend, Suzu; after entering the pageant they go to a seedy dance club nearby at the insistence of Suzu's menacing boyfriend.
The story is laced with dread from the beginning, and Laura soon finds herself a witness to a gang shooting.
Many at the club are killed. It's never really clear who is getting shot, or who is doing the shooting, or why, and as Miss Bala unfolds the idea of good guys and bad guys is further eroded. It just doesn't seem to matter what side you're on.
This is underlined when Laura goes to the police to find out what happened to her friend Suzu after the shoot-out. The cop she talks to delivers Laura directly into the hands of the gang responsible for the club killings. Things are bad.
They get worse.
The boss of the bad guys, Lino (Noe Hernandez), takes a shine to Laura. Instead of killing her, he uses her as a driver and a smuggler, and she is soon immersed in a world of ever-increasing violence. At the same time, her new 'friends' have the muscle to control everything in their world, even beauty pageants, and Laura finds herself a frontrunner for Miss Baja California -- whether she wants to be or not. Her only motivation is to protect her father and her little brother from the thugs, and maybe get out alive herself.
But who are the thugs? Every time you think you know who the bad guys are, the story shifts a little and perceptions change.
Miss Bala is a story about cops, robbers and the drug trade in Mexico, and for what it says about the top-down corruption, body count and general wild frontier atmosphere of the place, you could call it a horror movie.
Stephanie Sigman plays Laura as a survivor who gives up trying to figure out what will happen next; the viewer is kept in the same state of terrified confusion.
Miss Bala is in Spanish, with English subtitles. The film played at Cannes in 2011 and -- tourist trade notwithstanding -- it was Mexico's best foreign-language entry for the upcoming Academy Awards.
