Julio Bracho’s Crepúsculo (US: Twilight) is essentially a romantic drama saturated in a noir atmosphere and given the full noir visual treatment. Told through a flashback structure, brilliant surgeon Alejandro Mangilo (Arturo de Córdova) accompanies his friend Ricardo Molina (Manuel Arvide) to a sculpture class where he becomes instantly fixated on the beautiful model who happens to be his former girlfriend Lucia (Gloria Marìn). When Alejandro later returns from a three-month sojourn through Europe, he learns that Lucia and Ricardo have married, which only heightens his desire for her, especially since the attraction is mutual. Needless to say, they commence an affair which ultimately pits the two men against each other and plants in Alejandro an uncontrollable impulse to do away with Ricardo permanently. Much like his earlier Another Dawn (1943), Bracho establishes an oppressively gray atmosphere to provide psychological tension thick enough to cut with a knife, the slow pace, constant close-ups, slanted camera angles, and seemingly omnipresent light between window blinds creating an almost dream-like effect. Also noteworthy are the dramatic, detailed interiors, from the coffers of the art museum’s ceiling to the stones and mortar lining the cabin’s staircase. By the end of the film, Alejandro is playing sculptor himself, but the material is bone, as he’s carving into a skull on the operating table (“If I tap the chisel any harder than necessary, it will be instant death”), a terrifically tense scene in which the surgeon’s building anxiety finally comes to a head (literally).