In the Mexican film Tekuani: The Golden God (aka Tekuani, The Guardian) three friends who work together as independent rescue workers are having a rough go of it. They help people who are trapped underground or in remote regions of the country, and their reward is often no more than a chicken or a turkey.
Carlos (Manuel Uriza) is a family man, and he's beginning to buckle under the financial pressure. His wife is none too happy about his inability to provide for her and their children, and the bills are mounting rapidly. So when the team arrives in a dense, hilly forest where a woman named Itzel (Iazua Larios) wants them to find her brother -- a guide who took a tourist group out on a trip and is now missing -- Carlos senses futility in the offing and is ready to head home.
But then Itzel assures the team that the tourists have big bucks, in cash, prompting Carlos to make a quick change in attitude. He pushes his friends Adolfo (Ivan Arana) and George (Philip Willingham) into accepting his idea to extort as much money from the tour group as possible. Finding the tourists is quite easy, it turns out, because they're all dead. All, that is, save for Itzel's brother, which is when the film takes a turn that is revelatory about her true intentions.
Meanwhile, the men ransack the camp for whatever valuable goods they can recover, and that's when they discover the titular idol, a huge monstrosity that they reckon is worth millions. Naturally, they want to take it with them, a herculean task that is soon made incredibly dangerous because of the value of the golden god.
From there it becomes a question of who will survive, and how. Sergio Sanchez Suarez, who wrote and directed, comes up with several good twists that keep the proceedings happily off-balance. Though the performances are uneven, the conflicts flow naturally; for example, Carlos and Adolfo are bilingual, but George only speaks English. Under normal circumstances, that's not a problem, but in the heat and exhaustion of the situation, it becomes a point of contention, and adds to the tension that develops between them.
Granted, the pace is a bit torpid, and the original musical score is sometimes at odds with the action. Still, Tekuani comes across as a modest success, built on an evident desire to make a psychological drama with supernatural overtones.
(Originally published in slightly different form as part of a Morbido Fest dispatch. Full disclosure: For this Spanish-language film with portions of dialogue in English, I missed perhaps 15-20% of the dialogue -- my comprehension of Spanish is not so good -- but I feel like I got the gist of the conversations and story, though I know I missed some of the humor and possibly other plot points, judging by the reaction of the audience.)