Director: Nelson Carlo De Los, Santos Arias Screenwriter: Nelson Carlo De Los, Santos Arias Cast: Jhon Narváez Sor, María Ríos Distributor: Monte & Culebra Running Time: 122 min. MPAA: Not Rated

Late last year, I watched Dahomey, a film that tried to mix the ghostly narration of an ancient spirit with the modern-day political documentary of Benin. At a brisk 68 minutes, that film touched on the lingering voices of lost traditions and the concerns of preserving it in the present, where the anti-colonialism movement has been slow. Pepe, however, makes the mistake of trying to mix a ho-hum human drama of the Dominican Republic with the existential contemplations of a dead hippo. This film gets so lost in its meshing of mankind’s understanding of nature that the guttural sounds of the hippo narrator are the least of the film’s problems.

The hippo himself spends little time contemplating on the humans that slaughtered him. His thoughts draw to the sounds of the animals, the unspoken understanding of the environment, and the fears of the unknown. The common questions we all consider are between the absurd animal sounds and the deep voice. If we have no body, do we exist? What is language as we understand it? Do we know what we comprehend? Who are we? What lies beneath our reality? I never expected this hippo ghost to divulge all these mysteries of the universe. Still, he does spend a lot of time posing questions more like a meditation tape, aiming to pontificate on something so profound you won’t be thirsty for answers. A little of that lamentation goes a long way.

Most of the film’s second half is reserved for the human stories of common threads. These stories include a crumbling marriage, a beauty pageant contestant, and the hunters who think little of the targeted animals. These many scenes do have some humanity to them, but are also diced up into chunks so brief that they feel more like an acting real than an anthology of a community that doesn’t think as much about hippos beyond trouble for the waters and game to be hunted. The film seems to be leaning toward the intersection of mankind and the animal kingdom, where neither side seems to understand the other fully. There is some contemplation for this framing for anybody who wants to know how cognisant the hippos are that are being hunted. What do they think about in their spiritual state? Evidently, they try to comprehend the meaning of words they do not understand and a world that never seems to make sense.

Pepe drags out its avante-garde nature of hippo-based post-death thoughts and the connections to our existence. The deep thoughts feel less like meditations on our world and more like daily thoughts pulled from a calendar in their scattershot nature. The meandering nature grows mundane at over two hours with every familiar dose of melodrama, existential narration, and hippo noise. Even Doctor Dolittle would tell this hippo to shut the fuck up with its constant droning of identity, nature, language, and the afterlife, feeling more like a hippo’s impression of Werner Herzog.

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