Review of The Trade (2018)
Seen in 2018.
The US-Mexican heroin trade.
A follow-up to the director’s Cartel Land (2015). It’s dark, but not quite as dark as Dark States (2017), nor as poignant. The music, and much of the visual presentation, is generic, obscuring substance with style. The attempt to include both the Mexican producers and US consumers of heroin in every episode, but not the pharmaceutical industry’s abusive pushing of opiates, is forced and slightly misleading.