This is a powerful confrontation of the religious irony, corruption and injustice at play in the Dominican Republic, as a devout Evangelical Christian man returning home for his murdered father’s funeral must tolerate paganistic rituals and his family’s call for ‘moral’ revenge.
Review #3,013
Dir. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias
2017 | Dominican Republic | Drama | 106min | 1.33:1 & 1.85:1 | Spanish
NC16 (passed clean) for some sexual scenes and coarse language
Cast: Vicente Santos, Yuberbi de la Rosa, Jose Miguel Fernandez, Kalyane Linares, Enerolisa Nunez
Plot: An Evangelical Christian man attends the funeral services of his father in his hometown, where he has to participate in religious rites that clash with his beliefs and finds himself pressured to take revenge on the murderer.
Awards: Won Best Film – Signs of Life Section (Locarno)
International Sales: Luxbox / Guasabara Cine
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Religious Beliefs; Morality & Justice; Vengeance
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slow
Audience Type: General Arthouse
Viewed: Screener (as part of Perspectives Film Festival 2025)
Spoilers: No
After seeing Pepe (2024), which vibed entirely with the adventurous cinephile side of me, I made it a point to watch the director’s earlier Cocote sooner rather than later.
While I thought Pepe was more revelatory to me, Cocote was exactly what I was hoping for—enigmatic, anthropological, and yet unorthodox and postmodern in its filmmaking. I’m completely sold by director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, and anything he does henceforth, I want to see.
A gardener working for a rich family asks for some time off to return to his family home for his father’s funeral, but what he realises is that he is not just there to pay his respects and grieve with his extended family of relatives, he has been summoned to exact revenge on his late father’s killer.
An eye for an eye, as they say, and in the Dominican Republic, violence is as unremarkably quotidian as it comes.
The director makes pointed attacks at the corruption and injustice at play in his country, where para-justice is the law of the land, for as long as you are protected by someone richer and more powerful, it is carte blanche for anyone to do anything to another person.
Cocote, however, operates at a far more complex thematic level, with its head-on confrontation of ‘religion’ as a tool to control people, even to rein in loved ones.
“What kind of God is in your heart that I don’t have that has made you and the shepherdess such cowards?”
Alberto, the gardener, is an Evangelical Christian, but this clashes with the somewhat paganistic rituals performed by his people, which he shows little enthusiasm for.
In several aggressive shouting matches, he is labelled as a devil for believing in his faith, and this is where Cocote becomes incisive as a work on the role of age-old traditions in the modern world. At the same time, Alberto has to wrestle with the ‘morality’ of vengeance as a devoutly religious man.
He’s a good man, a gentle man, a disciplined man, but back into the chaos of familial obligations, he has no answers. The irony? Religion, in whatever concocted (or cocote-d) form, has no answers either.
The word ‘cocote’ in Dominican slang refers to the neck of an animal that will soon be broken, foreshadowing the prospect of spilt blood.
While the ritualistic songs-and-dances seem to go on endlessly (and some might find meanderingly), it is the director’s breathtaking engagement with cinematic form (e.g. black-and-white vs. colour, dynamic tracking shots, mysterious sound design, etc.) that gives Cocote the promise of a novel experience from a rarely-seen part of the world.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 