Early on in Sicario, a 2015 action thriller film, we meet Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), a young, by-the-book FBI agent, as she uneasily navigates the war on drugs. Kate questions Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a shadowy Colombian figure, as she misinterprets their mission. Nothing will make sense to your American ears, he slowly replies, but in the end, you will understand.

Many of us may be locked down, unable to travel freely, but we continue to explore the lives of others. Be it the timely resonance of Contagion or the stranger-than-fiction docuseries, Tiger King, our Netflix queues are depleting, inviting us to revisit films we may have overlooked. As Proust famously said, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Sicario demands exactly this. When I saw it at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I knew it would have staying power; I just didnt know why.

Around this time, interest in the war on drugs was at its apex, heightened by the Netflix signature series Narcos, Don Winslows Cartel trilogy, and President Trumps interest in the U.S-Mexico border, a zone of anxiety and often violent transformation, as Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen writes.

Borders are something I am familiar with. My father is a Canadian immigrant medical examiner, and I had heard tales of fear and insecurity growing up, something he confronted when he migrated from India, and my mother from Pakistan. Steeped in our cultural community, I searched for answers on how geography shaped our destiny. The human cost reverberates in Sicario, as the terrain expands from Mexico to Colombia and the American Southwest.

Savvy thriller

With its award-winning cast and direction, the film has drawn comparisons to Michael Mann, the Coen Brothers and, most notably, Steven Soderberghs Traffic, with one journalist calling Sicario arguably the savviest, smartest, and most exhilarating crime thriller to hit American cinemas in years.

But the films greatest strength is not what is present, but what is purposely absent. Characters leave things unspoken, which builds complexity while leaving the viewer unbalanced; that is how Kate and Alejandros dialogue creates the kind of creeping tension that coils around the audience like a snake suffocating its prey, writes Varietys Scott Foundas.

Most American action thriller films champion the great man theory: that direct action and muscular dialogue by individual actors lead to a resolution. But Sicario leaves things uncertain, without moral absolutes, conveying that information and relationships often exist, purposely, in a grey zone. The film portrays the so-called war on drugs not as a battle to be won but as an existential minefield, writes Olsen. Much of this is designed by the films director, Denis Villeneuve, a master of slow-burn thrillers, with characters seeking answers, both in the physical and the interior.

Whereas Kates angst comes from the gap between her idealism of due process and the reality of a shifting landscape, Alejandro is cut from considerably more complicated cloth, writes Foundas. He is a swift, unforgiving man, with a wolfish jowl and the preternatural calm of the predator lying in wait. Yet he also shudders in his sleep, reveals flashes of battered humanity when one least expects it, and even, fleetingly, a Hannibal Lecter-ish lust for the flinty young woman thrust into his path.

Still from Sicario.

If Sicario is a morality play for the astute observer, part of why it has lingered with me is its origin story. I watched the film with my brother, a logical and discerning surgeon, who was left unsatisfied. Our mutual admiration in the thriller genre was undone by his view that this film had just three amazing scenes the action parts and the rest was hella slow and boring, as he texted me. You didnt really know who the enemy was or what exactly they were doing... and youre left feeling unsure what the point of the entire plot and exercise was.

Simmering questions

Maybe that is on purpose.

My job isnt to answer any questions, my job is to ask them, says actor-turned-screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who reviles the idea that everyone in the audience has got to fully understand whats going on at all times. He prefers leaving things to simmer as long as possible, in allowing characters to be everything that they might be not just good or bad... An audience has to do some of the work.

Sheridans distaste for the familiar is shaped by his own journey. Texas-born and farm-raised, he struggled with loneliness when moving to Hollywood. He sought solace, unsuccessfully at first through the Catholic Church and the Krishna Center, and more fruitfully by reading Cormac McCarthy and later, through his own critically acclaimed American Frontier Trilogy, with Sicario as the lead. I left, and never thought Id go back, he said in an Esquire interview. But then you realise the ghosts werent there. The ghosts are wherever you are.

Sheridans films show men in pain using a rugged individualism to operate outside the rules of engagement, in vast, lawless, disparate lands. Set far from Hollywood, Sheridan shows a portion of this world that they dont know exists... and hopefully it makes people ask questions about themselves.

Still from Sicario.

My own introspection about foreign lands took me to Mumbai, a few months after watching the film. The comforts of an American Beauty-blueprint of a corporate job, mother-subsidised meals and weekend warrior sports, satiated my needs but not my soul. Working in human resources in a developing country for the past four years has been a course in cultural psychology. In one interview, I sat across the broad-shouldered, six-foot-one Kris, who came equipped with a slim-fitting suit, an American accent, all the right answers and, most notably, a steely resolve.

Personal struggles

But only after I began to observe him deeply did I learn of Krishnas precarious background his years in a call centre, his fathers struggle as a rickshaw driver, and his familys residency in Dharavi, one of the worlds biggest slums. I had interviewed hundreds of people sitting just two feet across from me, but how much of their world did I really understand?

Perhaps Sicarios effect is more visceral, more personal for me. Sheridan and his characters evoke memories of my misunderstood youth, with fits of precariousness and rage, hardening my belief in stoicism, moral flexibility and adaptability in uncertain times ever-present in Sicario. In these fragile times, when we see loss of life and find ourselves without answers, maybe the films teaching is on the nature of catharsis and how we move on from tragedy without getting closure, as Sheridan says.

Sicario is a meditation on transporting us, without the physicality. Travel is a leap in the dark. Its like a metaphor for life... you discover a different world and you discover yourself, says famed travel writer Paul Theroux. It brings the unknown. A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk.

Yet with limited mobility, isnt Prousts request of us to view the world with new eyes in an age where we are rethinking how we work, think and see the world more timely than ever?

The writer is an HR and Strategy Consultant based in Mumbai, and can be found at rolandm.com.

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An action thriller in shades of grey: Taylor Sheridans Sicario - The Hindu