The very first shot of Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives is of a bright corridor inside a jailhouse, straight down its length, with the cell doors to the side all unmistakably shut. This establishes two things: 1) the location of Garcia’s first of nine explored lives, Sandra (Elpidia Carillo), who is incarcerated in this very jail, and 2) the idea that, in critic Dan Schneider’s words, this film is about how “people…are their own jailers” and are enclosed not only by circumstances outside their control but by the consequences of their freely-willed choices.

This is a prevailing theme of Nine Lives, and perhaps its most subtle, but it is certainly not the only one. Also at play is the connectivity of community, how relationships proliferate beyond even the small(er) understanding of any one participant; as well as the human tendency to invent a grand(er) narrative that coheres events together in order to make better sense of them. […]