Robe of Gems is a surrealistic and unsettling Mexican crime mystery.
The Guardian said:
The film that everyone is talking about this year in Berlin is the dazzlingly accomplished and confident debut feature from the 42-year-old Mexican-Bolivian film-maker Natalia López Gallardo; as a former editor, she has worked with Lisandro Alonso and Carlos Reygadas, whose various influences are detectable in the movie’s mixture of languour and shock. The title appears to refer to a Buddhist parable about the man who lives in poverty, not knowing that a wealthy friend has securely but invisibly sewn a precious gem into his robe so that he would not have to live like this: the allusion is one of the many opaque and difficult things about this film.
It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere. Exactly what is going on has to be inferred through the indirect hints and cloudy indications; these are never finally and definitively revealed.
