A borderland thriller with an imperial unconscious, Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) is a film of our time. Drawing audiences into a world of ambient threat and righteous-but-morally-ambiguous revenge in the context of clandestine U.S.-Mexico drug wars, the film tells another, deeper story beneath its glossy veneer, one that rehearses the ways that citizen-viewers align themselves with state-sanctioned violence hiding under the cover of law. Sicario generates enemies and heroes alike who submit to these new procedures and ethics, encouraging audiences to accept mercenary violence and escalating torture as standard operations in the maintenance of democratic freedoms. This article argues that installed within Sicario’s seductive affects and martial aesthetics lies a meditation on paradigms of contemporary visuality and what could be termed the necroplastic infrastructures of empire. In militarized cinema as much as at physical borders, detention centers, and secured outposts, the imperial logic of counterinsurgent vigilance reproduces itself through the visual simulation of terror and reprisal, of maiming and drone surveillance, so that projects of erasure continue with the complicity of a willing viewer. A careful look at Sicario exposes these dynamics and gestures toward a counter-visual reading of war cinema’s verticalities, haptic realisms, and patriotic mandates.

Keywords: Sicario, Denis Villeneuve, military cinema, necropolitics, visuality, infrastructure