“Sicario: How Taylor Sheridan and Denis Villeneuve Collaborated Before ‘Yellowstone’ and ‘Dune’ on Netflix”

Almost a decade after its initial release in theaters, Sicario is gaining popularity on the Netflix Top 10 list. Typically, most movies labeled as political thrillers face a short lifespan. However, with the ongoing discussions surrounding drugs and the U.S.-Mexico border, which have been prominent since the 2016 presidential election that closely followed the movie’s debut, it remains strikingly relevant, despite originating during the Obama era.

After ten years, it’s clear that Sicario was a stroke of luck, feeling like a high-quality production in retrospect. This is not only because actors Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio del Toro have remained prominent figures in cinema, or because supporting cast members Daniel Kaluuya and Jon Bernthal have since gained more recognition. Director Denis Villeneuve crafted this film before becoming a favorite among enthusiasts with his work on the Blade Runner sequel and Dune. Cinematographer Roger Deakins captured this movie just before winning his well-deserved Oscars. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has also made a name for himself with his Yellowstone franchise, among other series, after the success of Sicario. Although it achieved moderate success and received a few Oscar nominations, it now appears as if it should have been a bigger hit.

The storyline of the movie, set along the border and often filmed and scored like a horror film, centers on Kate Macer (played by Blunt), an FBI agent recruited into a special task force led by CIA operative Matt Graver (Brolin) with assistance from a mysterious hitman (Del Toro). Kate soon realizes that her involvement is merely a workaround for a legal technicality preventing the CIA from operating independently outside the U.S. Even before this revelation later in the film, Kate senses that she was not selected for her law enforcement skills. The operation deliberately avoids standard procedures for arrests and evidence collection. Graver and his team aim to establish dominance through disorder rather than combatting drug-related issues directly.

Kate initially sticks with the group in part because she wants justice for the ghastly scene she comes across at the opening of the film, where a raid on a cartel house in Arizona, seemingly empty but for the dozens of rotting corpses the agents find squirreled away inside the walls. The search is punctuated by an explosive booby trap; though the tone is entirely different, the trappings aren’t too far removed from a Saw movie. Multiple other scenes have horror shadings, from a raid through a cartel tunnel (with night-vision cinematography recalling something like a zombie video game) to Kate’s hook-up with a local cop who turns out to be dirty (shades of a stalker thriller).

This mood comes courtesy of the Oscar-nominated Deakins cinematography (he would finally win his first one for his next Villeneuve film, Blade Runner 2049), which uses a few familiar tones in the depiction of Mexico by outsiders – the cranked white glare, the desert browns – but largely departs from the Traffic orthodoxy established 15 years earlier, namely that the country is yellow-filtered and grainy, with plenty of dust and sunglasses glint. Deakins uses a sharper, starker look for the daylight action scenes, and dusky, shadowy images for the nighttime ones. Notably, yellowish lighting comes into play more in scenes of interrogation, where the “good” guys are pressing captives for information, imposing their will on Mexican people.

It’s hard to say whether Villeneuve and Deakins are consciously critiquing what had, by that point, become condescending visual clichés. Sicario, in general, occupies an uneasy and fascinating space between nasty genre pulp and genuine critique. Is Kate stubbornly naïve about how to address cartel-related cases, or is Matt so smugly convinced of the effectiveness of restoring U.S.-friendlier cartel “order” that he’s indulging a forever war at the behest of the state? Within that ambiguity, there’s more: Is the movie genuinely ambivalent about these issues or noncommittally both-sides-ing to enhance its dark thrills? Whatever balance it strikes, its 2018 sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado (which loses Blunt, Villenueve, and Deakins, among other vital ingredients) tips further into glorification, seemingly less out of any real political conviction than a misguided desire to go hard as a thriller.

That’s certain what Sicario does, and there’s something pointed and uneasy about the way its climax departs from Kate and Matt entirely, following Del Toro’s assassin on a vengeful mission with a bloody, impossible-to-justify outcome. Though some could probably still read the sequence as acceptable collateral damage, it plays especially scary in the second Trump era, where the twin boogeymen of drugs and immigrants are intertwined in political rhetoric and used to justify, well, just about anything – not policies that are proven to lower crime or help victims of the drug trade, but provide some kind of vengeful release, no matter how ugly. Villeneuve is too clinical to push more emotional buttons, and maybe ultimately too much of a showman to deliver anything more than a visceral chill. But to his credit, he made a crime thriller whose discomfort doesn’t diminish with its rewatchability.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Watch Sicario on Netflix