Nona is a 2019 drama about a girl from Honduras who meets and man, who promises to get her safely to America to reunite with her mother.
The hope for something better is a dream nearly all share no matter where or what our lot in life may be. For writer and director Michael Polish, that hope begins in Honduras, in a small city where there is little prosperity, the streets thick with crowded markets and crumbling, dirty avenues, kids playing is water soaked in trash, and it soon becomes clear it’s symbolic of the world entire, an ‘unforgiving’ one a character explains in an early moment, describing her near-death experience at the hands of men with guns. So it is for Nona, a film that lays its cards on the table at the start for those paying attention or perhaps primed for what lies ahead, yet manages to convince us that what we’re seeing is something else.
Nona (Sulem Calderon) is alone in Honduras, a young woman whose brothers and father are all dead, mostly from violence for petty things. Her mother has already made it to the United States but can’t afford to pay for her daughter to join her, leaving Nona to take care of herself. She does so as a painter of the dead in a local morgue, longing to put her skills to work as a beautician and make money to reunite with her mother. One day she meets a young handsome man on a Vespa, who comes ’round again and again, and soon they become friends as he offers a chance to travel north. He is Hecho (Jesy McKinney). He’s kind and warm and the two are soon on the road, where wonder and hope and promises of love and salvation lie behind his every word. But at what cost?
Like so many films these days, we begin in the present, very briefly, then are snapped back to tell the story of how and why things came to be. It’s not that the opening imagery gives away where Nona is headed, but it does paint a harrowing expectation, one that lingers heavily on all the joy that surrounds her as she travels onward and upward with Hecho. In fact, if it weren’t for the troubling shot of Nona’s starkly-lit face, swathed in deep shadow, staring directly at us when the film begins (a disembodied voice asking what’s her name), we might mistake the remainder of the film as a kind of romantic road trip movie, which it works well to be, the couple bonding on buses, boats, and cars while America awaits.
The third act begins in Mexico, right at the border, where Nona must wear a blindfold so those helping illegals to pass through won’t be identified, and it’s here where we the viewer suspect something isn’t right. It’s an emotional moment as the screen goes dark. When our sight returns, everything has changed.
I won’t spoil the fates of these characters but suffice to say that the prophecies of an unforgiving world are brought to bear. It’s a jarring shift that puts Nona on a challenging pivot, one that isn’t entirely new of course, but one that can never have too much awareness given to it. Kate Bosworth shows up very late in what amounts to a very brief cameo – though she is top-billed – offering a blunt English (the film is up to this point entirely in Spanish) voice that feels unnecessarily expositional. Either way, Nona is a unique take in this genre, earnestly working to give the young woman at its heart greater investment in earning sympathy when the time comes. Recommended.