I was lucky enough to discover The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box) in a place that somehow felt perfectly suited to it. During a trip through Mexico, I watched the film at Kinoki Foro Cultural, a small café-cinema in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. Far removed from the experience of a multiplex, it was the kind of intimate setting in which a film can unexpectedly stay with you. And this one certainly did. Kinoki itself continued screening the film in 2026, listing it as a Mexican production directed by Ernesto Martínez Bucio.
What initially appears to be a modest story about five children inside a house gradually reveals something far more unsettling. The Devil Smokes is raw without constantly looking raw, disturbing without relying on conventional images of violence. Much of its darkness is filtered through children’s games, fantasies, invented rules and misunderstandings. Its apparent cinematic simplicity hides a remarkably complex film about abandonment, fear and the ways children reconstruct reality when the adults around them can no longer provide safety.
| Film Title | Movie Details |
|---|---|
| Country | Mexico |
| Year | 2025 |
| Genre | Drama |
| Runtime | 97 min |
| Director | Ernesto Martínez Bucio |
| Main Actors | Mariapau Bravo Aviña, Rafael Nieto Martínez, Regina Alejandra, Donovan Said Martínez, Laura Uribe Rojas, Carmen Ramos |
Set in Mexico during the 1990s, the film follows five siblings who find themselves effectively abandoned by their parents. They remain together in the family home under the care of their grandmother Romana, a woman struggling with severe mental illness whose perception of the world increasingly enters the children’s own understanding of reality.
That is almost all that needs to be known beforehand. The Devil Smokes works particularly well when we enter the house with limited information and gradually begin to understand its strange internal logic.
Director Ernesto Martínez Bucio, working from a screenplay written with Karen Plata, observes the children from remarkably close range. The outside world exists, but for much of the film it feels distant. The house becomes their universe: a playground, a shelter and, increasingly, a place governed by fears they cannot fully understand.
What affected me most is the way the film places us so convincingly inside a child’s perception of adult catastrophe.
Children rarely understand family breakdown in the language adults use to explain it. They see absences, overhear fragments of conversations, notice changes in behaviour and invent explanations for things nobody has properly explained to them. Fear consequently becomes entangled with imagination.
In The Devil Smokes, games are not an escape from reality. They are one of the children’s ways of processing it.
This is where the film’s apparent simplicity becomes deceptive. At first, some scenes can seem almost anecdotal: siblings playing together, arguing, telling stories or wandering through rooms. Gradually, however, these ordinary childhood behaviours acquire a darker meaning. The children are constructing a world they can understand because the real one has failed them.
There is something particularly cruel about seeing serious adult problems translated into the logic of childhood. Abandonment becomes waiting. Mental illness becomes superstition. Anxiety becomes a game. Threats become monsters.
And because Martínez Bucio rarely announces the emotional significance of these moments, the film can catch us off guard. Something that initially appears funny or innocent may become deeply uncomfortable seconds later.
The grandmother is central to this atmosphere. Carmen Ramos plays Romana not simply as a source of instability but as another vulnerable person inside the house. Her fears, rituals and distorted interpretations of reality begin to circulate among the children, making it increasingly difficult to establish where imagination ends and genuine danger begins.
That uncertainty gives The Devil Smokes an unusual tone. There are traces of horror here, but very little conventional horror filmmaking. The frightening element is not a supernatural presence hiding somewhere in the house. It is the gradual realisation that the children have no reliable adult capable of telling them what is real and what is not.
The young cast is exceptional precisely because the performances rarely feel performed. Mariapau Bravo Aviña, Rafael Nieto Martínez, Regina Alejandra, Donovan Said Martínez and Laura Uribe Rojas create the messy, noisy and constantly shifting dynamic of actual siblings.
They can be affectionate and cruel within minutes. They irritate one another, invent things together and form temporary alliances. Martínez Bucio does not sentimentalise them, and this makes their vulnerability much more powerful. These are recognisably children rather than miniature adults written to communicate the film’s themes.
Visually, the film is equally restrained. Cinematographer Odei Zabaleta does not attempt to beautify the children’s circumstances or impose an elaborate visual language on them. Rooms, corridors and domestic objects gradually accumulate significance simply because we spend so much time among them.
The house eventually begins to feel almost detached from the rest of Mexico. Time behaves strangely there. Reality becomes uncertain. Memories, fears and fantasies seem capable of occupying the same space.
And yet The Devil Smokes never needs to transform itself into something overtly surreal. Its strangeness comes from perspective. We are experiencing a broken family largely through people who do not yet possess the emotional vocabulary to describe what is happening to them.
That makes the film’s rawness particularly effective. There are painful realities underneath almost everything we see, but Martínez Bucio frequently disguises them in play. The film understands something uncomfortable about childhood: children can continue playing in circumstances that an adult immediately recognises as devastating.
The contrast is heartbreaking.
The Devil Smokes premiered in the Perspectives competition at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, a section devoted to debut features. It left Berlin with one of the festival’s major recognitions: the GWFF Best First Feature Award, worth €50,000, awarded to Martínez Bucio and the film’s producers.
The recognition feels particularly appropriate because this is a remarkably confident first feature. There is no desire to demonstrate filmmaking ability through unnecessary spectacle. Martínez Bucio trusts the house, the children, the sounds, the objects and the peculiar logic of their games.
That restraint is precisely what allows the film to become something larger.
Watching it at Kinoki in San Cristóbal de las Casas probably made the experience even more memorable for me, but I suspect The Devil Smokes would have had much the same effect anywhere. It is one of those films whose modest scale initially disguises its ambition.
It looks simple. It isn’t.
Beneath the games, arguments and childish imagination lies a painful portrait of neglect and a question that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: what happens to children when the adults who are supposed to construct a safe reality for them are no longer capable of doing so?
The Devil Smokes never needs to shout its answer. It leaves five children alone in a house and allows us to understand the rest.
