This is a movie that isn't for everyone, but has some tremendous symbolism. Medellin, Columbia plays itself and at a deeper level, earth. A writer returns to Medellin after a being away for most of his adult life, and finds it a hideously dangerous city, where kids kill one another with a stunning casualness. The writer has an ongoing homosexual love affair with one young assassin, and this closeness reveals that the assassin has been marked for death by another gang.

Repeated themes are the sudden attempts and successful murders that have practically no emotion attached to them, and a second theme of the meaningless of the existence for the kids in this hell-hole, where the highlight of a day might be eating a guava filled pastry.

The writer assumes a role similar to that of a Greek god playing with mortals. Without spoiling the plot, there are limitations to the power of his money and influence though, and attempts to transcend Medellin for a better life are thwarted.

The core of the film is not the surface morality play, but the unsettlingly blunt exposition of the idea that we have to get beyond revenge, sex, and entertainment to have any sort of meaning to life.

The tour of Medellin was worth the price of admission by itself.

Spanish language, subtitled.

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