Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Untamed Royals’ on Netflix, a Mexican Class-Divide Missive in Which Rich Teens Behave Reprehensibly

Untamed Royals (now on Netflix) is a dead-serious eat-the-rich drama from Mexican director Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz. It’s a bit of a maddening watch, since it dramatizes the vast gulf between the privileged and working classes via the hedonistic, sociopathic actions of teenagers who seem to be testing how much social and legal leeway their parents’ wealth provides them. But these kids also loathe their parents, who are awful people who, shocker, went on to raise awful children. It’s complicated, is what I’m saying – and be warned, the movie may test how long you’ll stick with a movie populated with loathsome characters. Thankfully, it’s only 99 minutes long.

UNTAMED ROYALS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: These people have a whole damn equestrian setup. Horses, stables, ranch hands, a riding hall. The house is a giant modern concrete bunker with a thousand sharp corners. Money money, everywhere. Xavier (Juan Pablo Fuentes) lives there. He’s not there right now, because he’s busy telling his therapist that he gets aroused whenever he tells a lie. And he’d be home sooner if the family driver, Leopoldo (Allan Urbano) didn’t get fired this morning for allegedly stealing a watch belonging to Xavier’s father, Santiago (Francisco Rubio). The dynamic in the house is ugly ugly ugly; Xavier overhears their two housekeepers, Mari (Itzel Quintal) and Paty (Caraly Sanchez) saying they don’t believe Leopoldo did it. Santiago isn’t ashamed to play favorites with his children – he clearly holds more affection for his daughter Mariana (Ximena Lamadrid) than for Xavier, who he can’t talk about, or talk to, without calling him a lazy asshole, direct to his face. And whenever Xavier hears it, he stands stoic. No wonder he’s in therapy.

That night, only Xavier and Mari are home. The doorbell rings. Mari answers and a man KOs her with a brutal punch. He’s wearing a rubber stuntman mask like Ryan Gosling in Drive. He ties up Mari and covers her face and she listens to horrible things happening to Xavier in a nearby room. Cut to said room, and Xavier takes a punch to make things convincing, but pantomimes the rest, e.g., being sexually violated. See, the “robber” is Xavier’s best friend Gerardo (Fernando Cattori). They find Santiago’s cash stash and load it into a tote bag and Gerardo takes off, but not before he puts a bullet through Xavier’s side, to make it seem extra convincing.

Why? Well, I’ll show you who’s a lazy asshole surely has something to do with it, but beyond that, no spoilers, amigo. We learn that Gerardo is sleeping with Pilar (Ana Wills), an older married woman who lives nearby, and that Xavier masturbates while spying on them having sex. Xavier’s girlfriend Renata (Renata Manterola) also is rich as hell, with a fat social media following and heaps of condescension toward the servants in her family’s employ. One day, Renata’s mother, a prominent doctor, gets a call from a distorted voice saying Renata’s been kidnapped and demanding a pile of ransom money. Now, you have three guesses who the perps are, and the first two don’t count.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Untamed Royals combines the rich-kids-behaving-badlyisms of Saltburn, the eat-the-richisms of Michel Franco’s New Order and the exploration of social-class dichotomies of Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. 

Performance Worth Watching: Fuentes and Cattori’s intensity goes a long way here – they play people who are, at face value, unsympathetic and grotesquely selfish. Sometimes there isn’t quite enough to the characters to fully round them out, but the performances are never unconvincing.

Memorable Dialogue: Gerardo understands how rich, privileged, demanding, cruel parents work, and therefore justifies the desire to burn it all down: “You f— up once, and they want to blame you for everything.” 

Sex and Skin: These teens are horny – rear, frontal, toplessness; moaning ‘n’ groaning intercourse; head-giving and -taking.

Our Take: Narrative clarity isn’t Untamed Royals’ strong suit – Ozcariz errs on the side of efficiency, at the expense of a third act that steps on the gas so abruptly, it outpaces its emotional agency. Keeping the run time tight is understandable, considering how unpleasant these characters can be; Xavier and Gerardo aren’t as fun to hang out with as the devious little sickos in Saltburn, being driven by malice more than mischief, and teetering precariously close to self-destructive nihilism. And, you could argue, they’re too young to be aware of it.

The film makes its points in bluntly effective fashion, all but bellowing that privilege – or the desire to experience it – causes rot from the moment a person emerges from the birth canal, and reflecting that rot in its characters’ rampant hedonism and lack of empathy. (To use the words of Daniel Plainview, they have within them a competition.) In this picture, nurture trumps nature among the Mexican upper class, which also exerts its influence on the authorities; a cop played by Alfonso Herrera, who “works for the attorney general,” takes on the robbery/shooting-of-Xavier case, and proves to be all too willing to blame the servant class, or take advantage of things for their own gain. 

Ozcariz’s approach to violence and sex and drugs and savagery in general is just this side of brutal; the film isn’t exactly subtle. Thematically though, it stops shy of wielding a sledgehammer. Untamed Royals depicts shocking behavior, but is too calm and concise in its visual method to indulge base shock value. Its sense of setting is its ace in the hole – as an American viewer, I saw Ozcariz depicting a class divide that’s likely even more egregious and poisonous than that of my own country. The movie argues that using a bullhorn to speak truth to power about the origin of systemic moral compromise is absolutely necessary.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Untamed Royals isn’t pleasant viewing, but it’s absorbing and persuasive in its method and message.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.