Amores Perros (2000) Review: Three Lives, One Collision

Is Amores Perros worth watching?

Yes. Amores Perros is a ferocious, emotionally overwhelming first feature that changed how the world saw Mexican cinema, and it still hits with the force of the car crash at its centre. Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga weave three stories of love, loss and betrayal into a portrait of a whole city. The reservations are practical: it runs over two and a half hours, the middle story is weaker than the other two, and its scenes of violence, including against animals, are hard to watch.

What is Amores Perros about?

A violent car crash in Mexico City connects three stories. In the first, Octavio (Gael García Bernal) enters his dog in illegal fights to raise money to run away with his brother’s wife. In the second, a successful magazine editor leaves his family for Valeria (Goya Toledo), a glamorous model, only for their new life together to be thrown off course by the crash. In the third, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), a scruffy drifter with a pack of stray dogs and a hidden past, watches from a distance the daughter he abandoned years ago.

Amores Perros is Iñárritu’s first feature, written by Arriaga. It is a Mexican production in Spanish and runs 154 minutes. It won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes in 2000, took the Ariel for Best Film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

A city told in fragments

The film’s structure, which loops back to the crash from each character’s perspective, is now so widely imitated that it is easy to forget how fresh it felt in 2000. Here it serves a purpose beyond cleverness. The three stories cut across class: a working-class household, an affluent couple in a smart apartment, a man who lives at the city’s margins. The crash is the one moment when their worlds physically touch, and the film makes that collision feel like an argument about how connected, and how divided, a city can be.

Rodrigo Prieto’s handheld camera and grainy, high-contrast images give everything a frantic, documentary energy, and Gustavo Santaolalla’s music and the film’s pop soundtrack keep the pulse racing. It looks and sounds like a film made by people with something to prove, in the best sense.

Dogs as mirrors

The title can be read as love as a dog’s life, or as bitch-like love, and the dogs in each story work as reflections of their owners. Octavio’s fighting dog is his way out of poverty and a symbol of the brutality he is being pulled into. Valeria’s small pet stands for the pampered life that suddenly turns claustrophobic. El Chivo’s strays are the only family he allows himself.

García Bernal, in his breakout role, gives Octavio a volatile mix of tenderness and recklessness that makes his bad choices understandable. Echevarría is extraordinary as El Chivo, a figure of real menace who becomes, over time, the film’s moral centre. His chapter is the richest and most moving of the three.

Where the middle story sags

The Valeria chapter is the weak link. Its premise, a glossy life slowly collapsing within four walls, is strong, but it is stretched thinner than the others and leans on a single situation that grows repetitive. The overall running time also shows: a tighter cut would have sharpened the film’s impact without losing its sprawl. And its dogfighting scenes, though staged, are graphic enough that some viewers will find them a barrier.

Who should watch Amores Perros?

It is essential for anyone exploring Mexican and Latin American cinema, and for fans of intense, multi-strand drama that plays with time. Expect graphic violence, animal cruelty depicted on screen, sex and strong language; it is strictly for adults. Give it a full evening and your attention, because the rewards build across the three stories.

For more from the same wave of Mexican filmmaking:

• Y Tu Mamá También, released a year later, with García Bernal again and a similarly frank, energetic spirit.
• Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s quieter, more intimate portrait of Mexico City and its class divides.
• Sin Nombre, a tense drama of young lives shaped by violence.

The verdict

Amores Perros is a raw, audacious debut that uses one car crash to map an entire city’s loves, cruelties and regrets. It is long and occasionally uneven, and some of its content is genuinely distressing, but its energy, performances and ambition make it one of the landmark films of the 2000s.

Rating: 4.5/5