Vague Visages’ Barrio Triste review contains minor spoilers. Stillz’s 2025 movie features Brahian Acevedo, Juan Pablo Baena and Jorge Cano. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Debut filmmaker and longtime music video director Stillz got the attention of EDGLRD founder and producer Harmony Korine through a Facetime call where the former filmmaker was lying on his couch and the latter was shirtless and smoking a cigar. This seems like an auspicious and thoroughly appropriate beginning to a collaboration that resulted in the scattershot, cocksure and ultimately fascinating Barrio Triste. Here is a movie that, shot on Betacam, is less a narrative than it is simply the work of a cameraman and director willing to record anything and everything he can get his eyes on. The 2025 film starts off like a substandard crime drama about a group of teenagers just driving around with guns in a downtrodden neighborhood, robbing jewelry stores and causing unprovoked mayhem in the streets. Barrio Triste is loud and obnoxious; the voices of the teens pierce and shatter the fragile microphones employed in the movie’s sound mix. But then the film transforms into something hypnotic and untraceable.

Barrio Triste feels in line with the energetic and floating camerawork of Stillz’s music videos he has made for several artists, most notably Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny, but it also stands as its own sort of gritty, meandering experiment that aims to excavate spaces within a particular setting. Many films that are fashioned as “found-footage” or “documentary-like” tend to create logical reasonings for the camera to be pointing at a particular object or being held in a particular way, but Stillz abandons these tenets. Instead, the director’s camera feels ironically detached, like it’s operating from another dimension and takes various hiatuses away from the action. Stillz films from alley to alley, room to room, person to person, leaving no space uninterrupted by his camera’s documentation as if counting down and checking off the items — a crude and dark open house tour. There’s even a scene where the filmmaker enters an enclosed room with a horse and then leaves after giving the animal a bite of a carrot.

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Many aspects of Barrio Triste, especially in the first half, feel contrived for sure, and several of the instances of the camera being slowly panned and tilted through abject squalor feel a bit exploitative. Random characters get into fights, there’s tons of cursing/drinking/smoking and it seems like everything in the community is on edge; a place where the “innocent” bystanders want to just look at the ground and mind their business, because if they look anywhere else, they risk meeting the wrong eyes. Barrio Triste’s style and improvisations certainly welcome comparisons to Korine’s debut feature Gummo (1997) — which has the same kind of randomized delinquency, albeit in a low-income neighborhood of the American Midwest — though it doesn’t quite have that film’s perceptiveness. Instead, Stillz aims for generalization, and even the more intimate moments are mostly just filled with vague platitudes than anything specific about the premise or setting.

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The inspiration for Barrio Triste came from Stillz’s trip to Colombia with a charity organization, which begs the question of whether the film operates from a standpoint of communal ingratiation or “outsider exposé.” I think it could be both, as the movie takes a turn in the second half when the sun goes down, leaning into its rabbit hole of dark alleyways and abandoned buildings. Suddenly, the bank-robbing teenagers come face to face with a sudden force and light emanating from… somewhere. This is where Stillz’s visual style and low-resolution works to its advantage in new ways. Barrio Triste’s score, buzzing and humming in various drone vibrations throughout, finally reaches its heights as a strange melancholy wail into deep space. But this isn’t a respite, as the film gets more violent and shocking, while the reveal of strange objects and forms turns Barrio Triste into something that’s at least interesting if not illuminating. For a debut film, it’s a confounding and ironic movie, like much of EDGLRD and Korine’s output, with Aggro Dr1ft (2023) and Baby Invasion (2024) being key examples.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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