DVD Review: ‘The Night Buffalo’

‘The Night Buffalo’ (El bà ºfalo de la noche) just released on DVD this past Tuesday, April 28, 2009. This is the first feature-length film from director Jorge Hernandez Aldana, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

When I first read about ‘The Night Buffalo’ I thought the story sounded very interesting and anticipated checking this one out when it hit DVD. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where all the well-written positive blurbs on the DVD cover touting how great a movie it is are most kindly described as misleading.

In ‘The Night Buffalo’ a schizophrenic young man named Gregorio is released after spending two years in a mental hospital for cutting his own toes off in an attempt to keep the earwigs his imagines from eating his insides. While in “the bin” his best friend begins sleeping with his girlfriend, despite being in a relationship of his own.

When Gregorio returns home, he quickly figures out what has been going on and unexpectedly decides to kill himself. Before doing so, Gregorio devised an elaborate plot to to twist and torture his best friend’s mental state, leading him down a path that ultimately destroys his life and his relationship with his friends and family.

‘The Night Buffalo’ tells a story that could have been far more interesting if it had been written with more interesting characters that do more than screw each other in every other scene. I’m not against sex in movies, but not at the expense of a decent story. In fact, the pace of the film also suffers as a result of the excessive nude/sex scenes.

I needed to truly believe that Gregorio was mentally unstable. I needed to feel the distress and mental tension being afflicted upon Gregorio’s friend, but it just wasn’t there. Instead, he just came off like a punk kid without any regard for the others around him. The only character I felt any real empathy for was Gregorio’s girlfriend with whom his friend was having an affair. For her, I felt sorry and she gave a respectable performance, even if she did get naked in every other scene she appeared.

Aside from the writing and acting, ‘The Night Buffalo’ was beautifully shot with a hand-held camera and featured that wonderfully rich, Mexican palette of color and light that is often used in films from Mexico and South America. The movie does have it’s moments and the concept has potential, but the movie overall ends up being something of a labor to get through and offers little actual payoff to the viewer.

[Overall: 2.75 stars out of 5]