laird’s review published on Letterboxd:
I read a 1950s horror comic last month in which a mad scientist kidnaps two starry-eyed youths who are madly in love and locks them in a cage without food or water as part of a sadistic experiment which he proposes will prove that the bonds of love will easily crumble once the two begin to starve and their primitive animal instincts take over. Luis Buñuel wasn't so sadistic, but he certainly shared this scientist's (and Freud's) view that men are driven by repressed and irrational animal forces that, given the right set of circumstances, will overpower the (sometimes arbitrary) norms, barriers and boundaries of polite society.
Los Olvidados has the superficial appearance of a social problem melodrama--fatherless, impoverished youths roam the streets of Mexico City thieving and committing acts of shocking violence--but Buñuel isn't as interested in politically addressing the condition of poverty as he is in observing its effects on the fragile psyches of the people who suffer its consequences the most. This somewhat distanced, unsentimental, pity-free approach may be off-putting to folks who enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire, but its harshness has kept it relevant for over half a century. Buñuel lays heavy on the "man is an animal" message by opening with the kids playing a weird game of "bull and matador" and continually sticking chickens, dogs, and various other animals in wherever he could (without raising too many non-surrealist eyebrows). Always the provocateur, he then plays a wicked game with viewers sympathies as a victimized blind man soon becomes a victimizer. The working mother becomes the abusing mother. Friends betray friends. Friends murder friends. The human beast is an ugly thing. A murder takes place in the shadow of a construction site (at what price progress, etc). Fun carnival rides are powered by the sweat and blood of child labor. Buñuel was a socialist during the Spanish Civil War, so one could argue this is all a jab at capitalism, but by this point in his life, Buñuel was more disenchanted and distrustful of any system that claimed to offer solutions to the human condition. He was content to simply observe the madness. The human beast is absurd. Maybe that mad scientist was right.