The Bad Mexican
2017 · 15m · Uganda
Directed by Loukman Ali
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense
An unemployed writer gets one chance to secure a job and repay a gangster loan shark, but the day goes wrong.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a dozen indie crime shorts, but Ali's refusal to let the tension break into easy comedy or clear moral stakes is genuinely unsettling—it's a film that doesn't want your sympathy, which is exactly why it works.
The formal economy here recalls the Dardenne brothers' constraint-as-clarity approach: every scene stripped to its functional minimum, yet the editing rhythm builds a cumulative dread that most 90-minute dramas can't touch.
The genius move is treating the protagonist's desperation not as a character trait but as a *physical fact*—the camera stays locked on his face through each small humiliation, and that refusal to cut away or provide release is what transforms a survival story into something genuinely claustrophobic.
Reviews
It's a well written movie with even better execution. Loukman Ali's meticulous attention to detail is evident in this one as he delivers the message of the movie in just 15 minutes but by the end of it, it feels like a much longer movie because so much is packed in such a short time.