Synopsis
Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005) is Mexican director Carlos Reygadas's confrontational art-house drama — watch online on iFILM. Shot in Mexico City with a cast of non-professional actors and co-produced by Belgium, Germany and France, the film competed in the main section at Cannes.
Marcos is a driver for a military general's family. He and his wife kidnapped a baby for ransom; the child died. That fact sits at the centre of the film like a stone. When Marcos decides to confess to the general's daughter Ana — a privileged young woman who works in a brothel on the side — her response is not what he expected, and he misreads it entirely.
Reygadas works in long, slow takes: faces filmed in extreme close-up, massive cathedral services, the gridlocked streets of the city. Sin and flesh and the possibility of redemption are all handled with a literalism that rules out any comfortable distance for the viewer. This is demanding, deliberately abrasive filmmaking — not entertainment in any conventional sense, but precisely calibrated if you're looking for auteur cinema that refuses to reassure. Stream Battle in Heaven (2005) online on iFILM.
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