Our Lady of the Assassins (2001)

A world-weary middle-aged homosexual writer named Fernando (Germàn Jaramillo) and the two teenage boys he loves -- hustlers Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros) and Wilmar (Juan David Restrepo), who kill as easily as they kiss -- are the human characters in this bleak, baroque drama. Fernando moves first one boy and then the other into his big, expensive, but empty high-rise apartment, where each sweet-faced, murderous kid seeks out loud TV and stereo distraction. But the real star is the drug-stinking helltown of Medellín, Colombia, with its nonstop cocaine-fueled orgies of sex and death, and in whose alleys and sinkholes this nihilistic love story is set. In adapting Fernando Vallejo's savage 1994 novel about casual violence as a way of numbing profound loss in the society Pablo Escobar built, Barbet Schroeder took to the real mean streets, shooting in hi-def video (sometimes at personal peril), and casting non-professional residents of one of the city's most dangerous quarters as the child assassins. The movie turns precariously surreal when Schroeder depicts Fernando's nighttime dreams. But when he sticks to the waking nightmare of Medellín, he creates a powerfully disturbing picture of the living dead.