Intense on every level, Josué Méndez's gripping first feature is driven by dynamic camerawork and a star-making performance by Pietro Sibille as a young military veteran struggling to adjust to civilian life. Returning home to the slums of Lima after fighting terrorists and serving in the last years of Peru's war with Ecuador, twenty-three-year-old Santiago now finds himself doing battle with his deep need for order and control, a need he discovered in leading jungle patrols and killing. Set up for humiliation with violent skills nontransferable to civil society, he resists his former war buddies' invitation to rob banks and instead opts to drive a cab and have a go at computer classes. But “civil” society proves equally treacherous, as he's shunned and ensnared by his pathological family, disillusioned by a group of partying friends met while cabbing, and unable to reconnect with his long-suffering wife. Haunted and exhilarated by his combat self-shades of a Peruvian Travis Bickle-Santiago bristles with rage, paranoia and frustration. Chased by a roving handheld camera and laid bare in a psychologically taut voiceover and an of-two-minds alternation of color and black-and-white film stock, this is an all too relevant portrait of a former soldier pushed to the brink.