‘Pepe’ Review: A Footnote in the Pablo Escobar Saga Is Dreamily Reimagined as a Hippo’s Reflections on Life and Death

When Pablo Escobar was killed in an exchange of gunfire with Colombian special forces in 1993, the “Cocaine King” left behind a private menagerie that included four hippopotami. By 2007, the herd had grown to 16 hippos that lived free and continued to multiply in the Magdalena River and surrounding lands, gradually being perceived as a threat to local farmers and fishermen. One rogue male who had split from the herd, christened “Pepe” by the media, was killed two years later by hunters acting under instruction from the authorities. Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias spins an idiosyncratic version of that story in Pepe.

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Except that the Dominican director has limited interest in conventional linear storytelling. Like his 2017 narrative debut, Cocote, this discursive collage is a hybrid of documentary and fiction, teased into a philosophical tone poem on which audience mileage will vary. The disjointed opening stretch is especially challenging, and many will find it frustratingly opaque. I mean that quite literally, since much of it unfolds over a blank screen or in murky night scenes.

While TV news clips, walkie talkie transmissions and audio of machine gun fire touch on the death of Escobar, De los Santos Arias expects viewers to connect the dots between the drug lord and Pepe, without providing much concrete information. Instead, he veers off into the voiceover thoughts of the hippo narrator, marveling at the unfamiliar language coming out of his mouth, at the stories he seems to know instinctively, and puzzling over his origins while knowing for certain only that he’s already dead. 

Even by the frequently esoteric standards of the Berlin Film Festival, this is an adventurous selection, a formalist art film that might seem more at home in a festival like Rotterdam or even in Berlin’s experimental-friendly Forum sidebar. The low output of the Dominican film industry and the tiny number of those movies that reach international screens should guarantee some exposure, though Pepe is more likely to grab cinematheque programmers than commercial distributors.

The title beast’s intermittent narration shifts at various points from Afrikaans to the Namibian Bantu language Mbukushu to Castilian, often accompanied by his fellow hippos grunting and mooing. Pepe even vocalizes vowel sounds like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.

The film jumps into nature-doc mode when the creature visualizes his ancestral roots in southwest Africa along the Okavango River in the first of many stunning drone shots, this one capturing a hippo herd’s bodies glistening like smooth stones in shallow water. While a detour with a German tourist group is clunky, we learn through their local guide that the hippo is a wise animal with intimate knowledge of both water and land, and that despite its considerable girth, it can move faster than any of us.

De los Santos Arias seems most in his element working impressionistically with image-based storytelling, effectively so when the sound of approaching helicopters causes the herd to flee into the river. We see the choppers only in the shadow they cast on the land, returning in the opposite direction hauling large crates. When the captured hippos are transferred to a Caribbean cargo boat — “bound for the unknown in a floating machine” — Pepe again wonders how he knows this story. Perhaps he intuited it in the eyes of the herd’s elders or the scratches and scars on their aged bodies?

There’s charm in the idea of a hippo for the first time contemplating how a body of water can have no middle or edges, even if less of the occasionally windy narration might be more. The feeling arises more than once that De los Santos Arias is cluttering up a captivating story with obscure distractions, random shifts between color and B&W and constant shuffling of the film’s style. And yet, the slow accumulation of pathos exerts a grip.

The stoner truckdrivers tasked with transporting the illegally imported animals once they get back on land are instructed to tell any police who stop them that they are carrying Dominican wild pigs. Once the cargo is delivered to the estate of the unseen but clearly shady boss, Pepe observes: “That’s how my parents arrived at this river and sealed my fate.” Already, farm workers have begun embellishing the legend of the hippos’ entry into Colombia, describing their delivery in a massive plane that looked like a flying whale.

The narration again gets a bit flowery as Pepe reflects on the curse of proximity to “the two-legged,” as he describes humans. Some parsing of pronoun semantics, for instance, prompts a bit of eye-rolling as the hippo rolls the word “they” around in his mouth: “A ‘they’ that could be ‘us,’ or a ‘they’ that strips all possibility of ‘us’?”

The film skips through the leadership change of the still-growing herd once Pepe’s father shows signs of weakening and his older brother seizes power, beginning a reign of terror that eventually sees Pepe exiled. Ghostly images of a hippo skeleton as Pepe contemplates the loss of his father presage his own death.

The human drama proves less engaging when the focus shifts to a river fisherman who gets a fright to find Pepe’s hulking form tangled in his net, almost tipping him out of his boat. It’s hard to summon much interest in the man’s squabbles with his ill-tempered wife, who shrugs off his claims of an encounter with some monstrous beast as just another bit of drunken nonsense.

The vagueness of his description of the unidentified creature also makes the local police commissioner dismissive when two fishermen warn of the likelihood of tragedy. But beautiful shots of Pepe’s eyes and ears breaking the water’s surface, watching a fishing boat across the river, help to build tension surrounding the animal’s fate, even if we know he’s doomed from the outset.

De los Santos Arias makes passing reference to beings brought to a foreign country then treated as a threat to be eliminated. But any intended human allegory for cultural dislocation or slavery remains under-developed.

For a more straightforward version of the story of how Escobar’s hippos were abandoned in his zoo after his death and then broke free to claim territory and breed in Colombia’s rivers, there’s the NatGeo Wild special, Cocaine Hippos. (Makes you wonder if a gonzo fictionalized take on the bizarre episode might serve to extend the Cocaine Bear universe.) While Pepe jumps around a lot more and spends too much time on artsy affectation, there’s a soulfulness to this account that sneaks up on you, amplified by De los Santos Arias’ unsettling electronic score.

It achieves full force in a breathtaking final image as the camera zooms out high above the sad spectacle of Pepe felled by bullets in lush green grassland, a half-circle of gawping humans standing over the hippo’s bloodied body. The uneven movie is worth seeing for that shot alone.