After 20 years in which he killed, tortured and kidnapped for a Mexican drug cartel, a sicario — hit man — tells all in the documentary “El Sicario, Room 164.” The unnamed man’s gruesome confession pours forth in a nondescript motel room — No. 164, to be exact — along the US-Mexican border. There’s a $250,000 price on his head, so he disguises his identity by topping his all-black attire with a black hood and having his voice digitally distorted.
“There are no borders for the narcos [drug traffickers],” he says of hiding from the mob. “The narcos pay off the police, customs, immigration.”
He tells how drug bosses recruited him when he was a young man studying to become a cop. Illustrating his words in a notebook, he tells why strangulation is the best way to kill someone, and why it’s especially difficult to rub out a woman. At the end, he shows how a rubout took place in that very room.
Working from a Harper’s magazine article by Charles Bowden, director Gianfranco Rosi avoids all embellishments, such as re-creating some of the crimes. A wise choice, since the hit man’s narration is compelling and frightening on its own.