Depeche Mode: M

Most people would say that you can’t beat the live experience of watching a band you love perform. That’s why concert films are such a tricky business with many directors falling flat in attempting to put us in the auditorium with the fans. Mexican director Fernando Frias takes on some of the philosophical ideas behind that with Depeche Mode: M, which was recorded over three nights in Mexico City in front of a total of 220,000 fans.

The dates were part of the band’s Memento Mori tour – the Latin phrase for “remember you will die” rendered all the more poignant by the fact that the record of the same name was the first Dave Gahan and Martin Gore had recorded after the death of their bandmate in 2022. Although chiefly a concert film, Frias also includes more experimental segments in which Mexico’s relationship with death is considered. It will come as no surprise it’s a lot more complex than films like Disney’s Coco would have you believe.

There are also interstitial moments of video art from Joshua Ellingson, who uses a modern version of the Pepper’s ghost technique – which aims to take an object from place and project it to another. This means, for example, that a fish can appear to swim out of a television screen into the air in front of it. This is the trick that Frias is in many ways seeking to achieve with the film as a whole – to bring what is essentially a ‘dead’ and finished concert back to life and through the screens to us.

The analogue analogy is a good one for a band that dates back to 1980. To put the passage of time in perspective, that’s 45 years ago and, if you were to go back 45 years more, that would put you at a point just after the start of the Second World War. Frias also nods to that analogue era with the use of various video stocks, with black and white imagery distorted so that it looks almost pixellated. Fortunately, despite these sorts of thoughtful flourishes, they are kept brief so that they don’t upstage the band.

Gahan and Gore – performing with help from Christian Eigner on drums and Peter Gordeno on keyboards – may be older but their voices are holding up well. Gahan still cuts a dash in a suit and brings an often sexual energy to tracks from Memento Mori including My Cosmos Is Mine, Speak to Me and My Favourite Stranger along with older classics such as Violator’s Enjoy The Silence, Never Let Me Down Again from Music To The Masses and a particularly magnetic rendition of Personal Jesus. A midway tribute to Fletcher by both the band and fans adds additional poignancy.

Shot in a mixture of colour and black and white, cinematographer Damian Garcia offers plenty of angle variation, from swooping high shots to up close lensing of the band members. The Ellingson segments slot in smoothly adding variation for a cinema audience without announcing themselves as ‘add-ins’. Existing fans may be the target audience but this has a much more nuanced artistic sensibility that offers something to chew on beyond great music.

Reviewed on: 27 Oct 2025