‘The Echo’ Review: Tatiana Huezo Returns With Another Harshly Poetic View of Mexican Childhood

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic “The Echo” — or rather, El Eco — is the name of a tiny rural village in Mexico’s Puebla state that sufficiently captivated Mexican-Salvadorean filmmaker Tatiana Huezo into filming it over the course of 18 months, observing its changes in weather, fortune and the temperament of its few, tightly bonded residents in fine, fraught degrees.

But there’s more to the title of Huezo’s return to documentary filmmaking — following the major success of her 2021 fiction debut “Prayers for the Stolen” — than a mere marker of place: Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.

There’s something of an echo, too, between Huezo’s last film and this one, even as they nominally occupy different forms: Just as “Prayers for the Stolen” followed the challenging adolescence of a young woman in a remote hillside community in the shadow of cartel violence, “The Echo” takes as its principal protagonist a teenage girl, Montse, prematurely aged by the rigors and responsibilities of a life on the land, and considering a path divergent from that of her parents and ancestors.

She may be a real-life human subject rather than a constructed character, but in its fully inhabited storytelling and environmental detailing, “The Echo” feels notably consistent with its fictional predecessor — as Huezo eschews interviews, voiceover or other editorializing for a slow-burning ode to face and place that plays as accessibly as “Prayers,” and should find a home in an equivalent range of