Lion's Den

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The admirable, well-made Argentine film Lion's Den features no performers you’ll probably have ever heard of, and that's to its benefit; it adds to the film's documentary-like realism. At the beginning of Pablo Trapero's film (he also did the underrated Rolling Family), a young woman awakens in something of a stupor, looking bruised and bloodied; she showers, still in that stupor, and goes to work. Later, at her job, when her head begin to bleed, she returns home to find her roommates dead and wounded. She calls the police, but with no suspects other than herself on tap, she ends up incarcerated in prison.

From this point on, the film becomes the story of the prisoner, Julia, beautifully played by Martina Gusman, beginning from a state of haziness then moving into anger, resignation and finally acceptance and growth. It turns out Julia has mother problems, and we meet that mother soon enough. Doing some kind of penance for her earlier abandonment of her daughter, mom ingratiates herself with the newly-found Julia, who herself is pregnant. Argentine law decrees that pregnant women prisoners can give birth and keep their children with them in prison up to the age of four. So we follow Julia and her cellblock-mates as they bond, raise their children together and become “family.”

All the while, Julia, tries to persuade the court of her innocence, and the look inside the justice system in Argentina that the movie proffers makes it appear both more and less fair than ours here in the USA. A number of twists, none of them predictable but all of them believable, keep the plot moving along, and the film’s ending seems particularly thoughtful and expansive. Even with a spate of women in prison movies over the year, Lion’s Den compares to no other film I can readily recall. It is definitely worth a watch.