He leaves Mexico City to go out to the country and prepare for his death, staying with an old indigenous widow in her ramshackle home overlooking a desolate canyon.

In the vastness of a wild and impressive nature, he confronts the infinite humanity of the widow and oscillates between cruelty and lyricism.

[3] The removed scenes are described as an unsuccessful attempt to strangle a bird that then stumbles around injured on the ground and a dog being forced to sing along with a song through the application of a painful stimulus.

[4] The film also includes an unsimulated scene of a bird being shot down and then killed by having its head torn off and the (off-camera) slaughter of a pig.

[5] Reygadas defended these scenes, as well as the explicit sexual encounters in Batalla en el Cielo, saying, "If you think about it, what’s so outrageous about a naked obese woman?