Wetiko

Aapo (Juan Daniel García Treviño) doesn’t need drugs to fall into a state of psychedelic delirium, and neither will you.

He is destined to lose his way from the moment that she (Dalia Xiuhcoatl) walks into the pet shop where he works with his mother, with its tanks full of brightly coloured, darting fish and spectacular jungle frogs. Even in the hustle and bustle of the city, she stands out, and it’s as if he’s never seen a woman before. The camera stays low, taking in the swell of her breasts, her pouting lips, her luminous skin. She tells him that her name is Luz. She wants toads. When his mother explains that she will need a reference from the shaman licensed to practise in her district, she obfuscates, then produces a large wad of cash. She wants toads, she says, and she wants Aapo to deliver them.

By this point in the film, we’ve already had a glimpse of the place that Luz has come from. Deep in the jungle, there’s a complex of caves. We witness what appears to be two men and a woman engaged in a sexual act there, one of the men taking pictures, whilst a third man waits nearby. Drifting around, the camera finds a cleft through the rock and looks up intp the daylight world above. It’s a cemetary, and somebody is hanging laundry on a grave marker. Luz speaks of this place, in tones at once enchanted and akin to a sales pitch, as the conscious community of the Empire of Love. Aapo’s mother, a Mayan woman, does not seem impressed, but she knows what kind of outsiders come looking for toads.

If he has dinner with them, she warns her son, they will turn him into a toad.

Director Kerry Mondragon has spent his life between Mexico and Caslifornia, and this film is strongly flavoured by both. A visual riot from start to finish, it’s full of movement, startling colours and images that morph from one thing into another. Watching our plucky teenage hero set out to deliver his toads, we see the city give way to more and more trees. We pause for a moment as he gives money to traditional dancers blocking the road, and it’s unclear to what extent he’s being charitable, doing his duty or responding to a threat. Subsequently, watching from above, the camera zooms out, then out again. The great mass of greenery on either side of him is so beautiful that it’s easy to think only of that. A second later and you will realise just how far he is from home. It would take days for him to get back without his moto, and of course he’s parted from that almost as soon as he arrives.

At the jungle camp, Mondragon moves between luxury and squalor with apparent carelessness, drawing on the rich history of Seventies arthouse trash. In one shot, women bathe in a pool like Waterhouse’s sirens; then we’re in a hut with a strung-out blond guy whose eyes imply a tendency to violence; then down in caves which are lit sometimes naturally, sometimes as if the late great Roger Corman were at work there. Half a dozen women called Maria wander in and out of shot, taking on the menial tasks which keep the place going, and sometimes other tasks as well. Luz describes them as victims of colonial Catholicism. Now, free or not, they all wear the same white dresses emblazoned with pictures of toads.

The way that Aapo is groomed and seduced into this world is unsettling from the outset and sometimes so crude that even he notices something is off, but he’s a teenager who plainly has no sexual experience, and he’s dazzled by the strange eroticism of this unfamiliar world. Dazzled too, perhaps, by the suggestion that here he is regarded as a man, an adult worthy of respect, or at least might be if he makes the right impression. Zake (Neil Sandilands), the older white guy whom everyone claims is the new shaman, does what such men do, alternating between charm and bullying, promise and threat. To viewers of a certain age, it will be his tendency to slip into Afrikaans that really sets off alarm bells. As his control of the community becomes more and more apparent, Aapo realises that he needs to get out of there, but first he wants to recover all the things that have been taken from him, and by then he is experiencing the full effect of the drugs he has been given, as are the audience.

If you’re going to make a film about a predator in the jungle, you might as well shoot parts of it in infra red. That’s just one of the approaches used here, however, as Mondragon plays around with perception, identity and time to create a world which is confusing but somehow never irritating with it – it is too vast and full of wonder for that. Meanwhile the sweetness that Treviño brings to the character of Aapo will keep you rooting for him. The tenderness he shows to his toads is an assertion of normal values in a place which has no room for them; where behind the glamour, the Marias lower their eyes and everybody else seems to be plotting something. One is reminded how much being a teenager in adult spaces can feel like having come in halfway through a conversation. The sense of it is often just out of reach, teasing at the edge of one’s awareness.

Keeping Aapo and the viewer locked into the present moment, Wetiko takes control, single-minded and multifaceted. By the end you will feel as if you are emerging from a fever dream. Even if you’ve gone into it sober, it’s probably best to wait a few hours before you drive or operate heavy machinery.

Reviewed on: 08 Jun 2026