Themes

The film deals very heavily with a series of complex and interlocking themes that it uses its tri-lateral story to approach from different angles. The primary theme of the film is love. Octavio loves his brother's wife, Daniel and Valeria are fostering a newly public love, and El Chivo does all he does out of love for his daughter.

Conversely, the film deals incredibly heavily with resentment, conflict, and division as the realities of a material world and what one feels they must do to survive, and intervene in what may be loving relationships. Both this sense of dueling love and conflict is present within the figure of the dog itself.

As the narrative complicates, and the three stories become intertwined by timing and circumstance; these themes are revised and broken down; challenging your interpretation of the movie as you're forming it.

Octavio y Susana

The emotional core of the first story is the yearning that Octavio feels for his brother's wife. He is head over heels in love with her, she flirts with him and they genuinely like each other. However, Octavio is too presumptuous and headstrong leading to boundary violations that make Susana deeply uncomfortable. This lesson about overreach and listening is seen again in Octavio's decision to take Cofi out for one more dog fight even though he has come way out ahead, a decision that sees Cofi shot and the car chase that would change the lives of everyone involved. This, having his brother mugged and forcing himself on Susana all lead to him flying too close to the sun instead of quitting while you're on top.

The dog, Cofi, starts as a symbol of love, something that Octavio cares for and after he discovers that Cofi can fight, Cofi becomes a tool of violence. The visual language of the film makes it very clear that these dog fights are dirty and vile, there is no romance or glamour. However, Octavio is supposedly doing all of this violence to make a better life for himself and for Susana. The Final word on that conflict is had when Octavio and his brother- a petty criminal who dies in a horribly bungled robbery- are both dishing out large amounts of pain for financial gain while neither of them listens to what Susana wants.

These symbols have been rearranged once again as the dust of the narrative settles. Cofi is once again a symbol of love, being reduced to a pitiful, wounded mess in the back of his car; Susana is turned into an object of scorn as she refuses to go along with Octavio's plan, ultimately rebuffing totally and fully his offer to move with her after his brother's death.

Daniel y Valeria

The second part of the story deals with a married father carrying on an affair with a famous celebrity, and their attempt at an honest life together. Valeria has a very cute and pampered dog, one much different than the power of Cofi, named Richie that serves as her emotional anchor. Thematically, the stakes are raised as the "impropriety in the name of love" idea that was present in the first part has been altered so slightly, turning an abusive and precarious marriage into a much more amicable one that Daniel has just checked out of. They try to make a real-life together with a house and working relationship, a stage that our prior characters never came close to.

However, all is not perfect; a reminder that even those that are better off still struggle appears as a hole in the floor that Daniel can't afford to fix. Things are going fairly well for the new couple until Valeria finds herself amid that car wreck, destroying her leg and requiring extensive wheelchair-bound rehab. The company of Richie and the help of Daniel keep Valeria stable as she recovers, a system that works until Richie falls under the floor and the couple's relationship begins to buckle from all the stress of Valeria's injury and the lost beloved pet. As the days drag on and Richie remains lost and potentially eaten by rats, tensions flair between the two of them, elevating their fights into ones that could potentially end their relationship, violently at any moment.

Again, Iñárritu takes this duality of love and violence and alters the relationship to create an entirely new dynamic.

Daniel finally finds a dirty and shaken-up Richie under the floor just as Valeria has an infected leg amputated. She returns home, and they find peace in a new life together, even if it had not been the one they imagined. Through the power of love and a period of extreme violence, they reformed their relationship into something more suited to their real situation and not what their fantasy had been.

El Chivo y Mura

The film's final act changes the approach entirely, moving from a question of romantic love to a question of parental love. El Chivo is a tired, old man; at the point in his life that we meet him it seems that he is interested in only taking care of his dogs and eventually collecting enough money to leave to his daughter. To EL Chivo, the dogs that he feeds and keeps with him are something he loves and that he orients his life around taking care of them. This relationship, one of nurturing, is wholly different than what was seen in the other character's stories. Conversely, El Chivo himself has the most violent life of the main cast. He is an ex-guerilla who now has to be a hitman on the very fringes of society. Additionally, for his entire story. El Chivo is stalking his long-lost daughter, watching and following but not trying to make contact. Much like Cofi, his personal ability and penchant for violence are used towards bringing in money for an emotionally important cause. This connection is reinforced when El Chivo recovers a horribly wounded Cofi from the wreck.

Shortly after recovering from the wreck, Cofi kills all of his other dogs and we are reminded of what Cofi is, a fighting dog who has been trained to kill other dogs. El Chivo, though tempted, does not shoot his new dog. Instead, he mourns the loss of his beloved animals and moves forward with his plan to escape from his life and leave money and a photo album with his daughter along with a phone message telling her it was him and that he is not in fact dead like she thought. He then takes his dog and escapes into the horizon.

El Chivo's Character arc takes this pattern of love-fueled violence and turns it around, making it far more paternal as well as distant and alien than it was in prior stories. Chivo's refusal to kill either his client or the man who hired him, instead opting to have the 2 men solve it themselves with a gun by themselves, he turns away from the hateful role he has accepted, with the deaths of his dogs making him more truly lose his edge and willingness to take life. All these concepts about boundaries, love, violence, and material pressures come to a head in the final chapter as El Chivo chooses a life of peaceful exile over the personal war he had been fighting.

Major Questions

Love

What woiuld you do to keep your love? What would you do for those you love?

Violence

How far would you be willing to go for what and who you love? What will it take?

Desperation

Although interpersonal problems are hard,, how do you deal with the immense economic pressures of Mexico?