A middle-class Mexican family in 1970-1971 undergoes a lot of changes amidst the riots and earthquake, as seen from the perspective of their Indian maid. This is the kind of movie The Boy and I used to see a lot a few years back: It’s kind of a movie for cinephiles (apart from any regional or nostalgic appeal), and one of those movies that grows on you.

The basic story is that Cleo is a young Indian woman (we never learn her age) from a poor village who cleans up after the four young children and the extremely prolific dog of a quarreling middle-age couple. She has a boyfriend who gets her pregnant, but even as the family is falling apart, the mother is helping the (terrified and abandoned) girl out. The mother is struggling with her wayward husband, and Cleo struggles with the prospect of being a single mom.

This movie is very slow-paced. It’s not really done in a high drama style: A lot of things play out in real time.The only music is ambient. Meanwhile, the camera is kept at the same level and strictly perpendicular to the characters, making the audience feel like they’re there watching it play out. The black-and-white cinematography is nice, and sometimes strikingly beautiful, but there isn’t a lot of noir-ish lighting and, as mentioned, the angles are kept flat.

What keeps you interested are the real-ness of the characters and some concern for their fate. Which of course won’t work for everyone, but did for us. At the end of the second act, there’s a kind of gut punch—well foreshadowed to be sure, but still effective—and I was joking with The Boy that my indie-film PTSD made me worried throughout the third act that far worse was going to happen.

If you’ve seen a lot of arty films, you know that the downer ending more than occasionally gives way to the grotesquely morbid dark carnival of horror, and because I had come to care about the characters, I was a little worried we were going to get a “And then they all got Ebola and died.” The fact that this was autobiographical for Cuarón  was not entirely reassuring, since certainly stories get exaggerated in the re-telling. My only real reassurance is that Cuarón is not a hack.

Anyway, the third act is dramatic but not lurid, and satisfying. You don’t end up feeling bad that you spent two-and-a-quarter hours with these people. They’re not perfect but you like them and are rooting for them. But you do have to rev down for the ride.

Oh! I didn’t give a penis warning for Mandy and some people appreciate those, so let me just say there’s a penis in this one, too. A martial arts penis.