Tigers Are Not Afraid broke my damn heart

Before creating the chilling horror of True Detective: Night Country, showrunner Issa López made her mark with a searing horror fable about children pitted against human traffickers. Released in 2017, Tigers Are Not Afraid would become the writer-director's calling card, a bleak horror fantasy that established López's knack for atmosphere and revealing characters via the things they fear. It also broke my damn heart.

Set in an unnamed Mexican city, Tigers Are Not Afraid follows Estrella (Paola Lara), a young girl we meet in a moment of horrific violence. As her school teacher lectures the class about fairy tales, gunfire breaks out outside, and in an attempt to comfort Estrella, her teacher offers her three pieces of chalk, saying they are three wishes. Over the course of the film's 83 minutes, Estrella will use these three wishes, to terrible effect. Orphaned shortly after taking them in, her mother presumably abducted by the human trafficking ring known as The Huascas, what choice does she have?

Tigers Are Not Afraid is a gentle film. It's about kids struggling with horrible things that have happened and will happen to them, things they don't fully understand yet have to accept and fight through anyway. When Estrella finds herself among a group of orphans similarly victimized by The Huascas (and the politician who secretly supports them), she ponders how to use her wishes for survival and recoils at the unintended consequences of using them – as Estrella's mother haunts her like a ghost for a wish that she would return. Tigers Are Not Afraid constantly injects its gritty crime tragedy with a touch of fairytale magic; sometimes to emphasize the innocence of the orphan gang, and other times to provide glimpses of the supernatural world Estrella believes she is haunted by.