Fireworks regularly explode over the hillside Colombian city of Medellin, and though the displays are professional-caliber, the celebrations are private, not civic: Each marks another successful shipment of cocaine to the U.S. The detail typifies the city, a place where the vestiges of civilization are maintained, but order and safety have become more rumor than reality. It's also the childhood home of Germán Jaramillo, a middle-aged writer who returns there with the stated intention of dying, even if he shows a greater interest in sleeping with teenage boys than taking his own life. His lover of choice, the angel-faced Anderson Ballesteros, becomes a kind of Virgil to Jaramillo's Dante. Jaramillo may fancy himself a nihilist, but in the company of Ballesteros—who can shoot a noisy neighbor in the street and show little sign of remembering the act at the end of the day, much less regretting it—he seems to recognize that he's found the term's true incarnation. Director Barbet Schroeder is no stranger to mean streets. As a documentarian, he covered Idi Amin, and after moving to Hollywood, he came to specialize in high-gloss, noirish thrillers like Kiss Of Death and Single White Female. Though it adapts a novel by Fernando Vallejo, in some respects Our Lady Of The Assassins is a return to the director's roots. Its location scenes were shot largely guerrilla-style, using digital video effectively without bothering with shooting permits. And, like many documentaries, it relies more on the slow accumulation of detail than on any particular story. He finds no shortage of material, taking his film through churches that double as drug dens, marketplaces periodically interrupted by the roar of motorcycle-mounted hitmen, and other dark corners. As a tour of a local inferno, Our Lady is often powerful, and Schroeder's ground-zero camerawork contributes to its effectiveness. In other respects, the film has its problems. Excellent at showing the environment that created Ballesteros and his friends, killers who seem too young to shave, the film has less of a sense of what drives Jaramillo, who delights in each new horror he finds when he's not railing against inhumanity. By the time he curses God after finding a dog with broken legs, Schroeder has already made his point several times over.