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Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Julio Hernández Cordon's Buy Me a Gun, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from July 12 – August 10, 2019 in Mubi's New Auteurs series.Julio Hernández Cordon’s fifth fiction feature, Buy Me a Gun, is a magical-realist story, loosely based on the realities of Mexico’s drug trafficking, in which a group of children navigates an apocalyptic, dystopian world. In the vein of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), the film is powered by the underlying idea that children are equipped with all the emotional intelligence and resilience they need—if not to fully understand, then to survive, or to even transcend, the most egregious violence.In the film, a young girl, Huck (Matilde Hernández Guinea), whose sweet, brittle voice guides us throughout in the voiceover, must pretend that she is a boy.

There’s a Fury Road of sorts running through “Buy Me a Gun,” Meso-American filmmaker Julio Hernández Cordón’s orderless, genre-splicing seventh feature, but it’s a bumpy, meandering one; driving along it, you’ll spot “Mad Max’s” desolate, sun-scorched vistas from the windows, passing by at a fraction of the speed. An indeterminately dystopian vision of Mexico in the full control of cartels — whether it’s post-apocalyptic, pre-apocalyptic or merely apocalypse-adjacent is among the many question marks here — the film ostensibly centers on a father and daughter struggling to stick together through a barrage of regimented violence. Yet Hernández Cordón’s narrative is too slender and sluggish to gather much emotional force; wearing such disparate influences as George Miller and Mark Twain brashly on his sleeve, he seems distracted from the task at hand by his smaller, more inventive strokes of world-building. Viewers may follow suit.

Thanks to such well-traveled,...

Located somewhere between “The Florida Project” and “Fury Road,” Julio Hernández Cordón’s precocious and arresting “Buy Me a Gun” is a neo-realist fable that’s seen through the eyes of a child and set in a world ruled by fear. It’s a major work in a minor key, a movie that gracefully straddles the line between the tenuousness of the present day and the violence of the post-apocalyptic thunderdome we’re all racing towards, real and unreal all at once.

We know where the story takes place, but the when of it is pointedly unclear. “Mexico,” the opening text declares. “No precise date. Everything, absolutely everything, is run by the cartels. The population has declined due to the lack of women.” And then we’re dropped into the dark of night. A little girl is locked in a cage, while men with machine guns laugh by a fire in the distance.