In the jungle of Columbia, there is an experimental prison consisting of an overgrown former estate, where a small group of teen boys convicted of multiple or serious crime are sent. Good warden Alvaro tries to rehabilitate the boys using mystic threapies including laying of hand. Bad warden Goody is more interested in giving the boys hard work with few tools. There are a couple of other occasional adults of significance. The owner of the estate wants the place cleaned up, and is not interested in punishment or rehabilitation. A prison inspector checks on the kids, and the wardens are infuriated when one of them complains.
The central story revolves around friends Eliú and El Mono. One (justifiably) wants his father killed, and one night while high on drugs they do it - except that the killed the wrong man. Now the body (which they dumped in a cave) is missing, while the dead man's relatives are after them.
This jungle is dark and brooding, even in the daytime. There are tensions even when the wardens are away, as the in-charge boys try to keep the others from slacking off. The boys (non-actors recruited from a wide casting call) are reasonably OK as troubled youths, though the non-imprisoned brother seems particularly wooden.
I saw this at the Toronto International Film Festival, with a Q+A with writer-director Andrés Ramírez Pulido. From his work as troubled teen boys, he found that they tended to hate their fathers and love their mothers, and in the film the wardens attempt to be surrogate fathers (without much success). He alo wondered that, given genetics and upbringing, whether some members of the younger generation would be doomed to a lifetime of trouble - though the film suggests that some may escape that fate.
Overall, I found the film thematically too dark.
