After preadolescent Andy (Emilio Puente) sees his mother gets fatally shot in a random robbery, he is sent to live on the country estate of his paternal grandmother (the wonderful Carmen Maura) who he has never met before.  She is rather cold and awkward with him and brushes off any enquiries of the whereabouts of his father with a dismissive ‘he’s away and will be back soon.’

The other member of the household besides the coterie of servants is Dhaly (Dulce Dominguez) his kindly aunt with Down syndrome who is obsessed with her  dozen cats.  However the one person that Andy does take too is Charly (Diego Alvarez Garcia) the very handsome gardener who is always shirtless and is instructed to take Andy under his wing.

The household in Cuernavaca feels less safe as there is more and more crime in the neighborhood and Grandmother is obsessed with the idea of finally  moving from the home that has been in the family for generations.  But it also holds the secrets that she has been deliberately keeping from Andy in particular.

Andy discovers his father’s cell phone and steals money from his grandmother to pay Charly to get it working again. One of the calls he makes is to someone he believes is a friend of his fathers and that works because soon after his surfaces at the house.

This is where he discovers that his father (Moises Arizmendi) has just been released from jail, although it will take him a while longer to work out why.  Meanwhile Charly is encouraging Andy to help him a stage a robbery which may have him heading for jail, and then to top it all off he discovers the real reason why his grandmother is so tough on everybody when she has a melt down one evening .

This intriguing coming of age movie is the feature film debut of Mexican TV director Alejandro Andrade and has this message of hope that your Andy (brilliantly played by Emilio Puente) never loses how matter how dark it looks for him.  He is too young to have sexual feelings but the longing he has for the handsome daredevil laborer goes beyond the norm for a boy of his age. His struggle with loyalties with the different people who love him is very real as none of them really attempt to get to know who he actually is. 

We never do get to learn in the end if hope is enough