A young man -- starving, nearly catatonic and barely responsive -- is confined in a sanitarium. He is taken on a field trip along with other residents to the city's red-light district. There, he encounters by chance a woman from his past, triggering a series of flashbacks. We see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers, and when he witnessed a murder/suicide: his father -- an American expatriate living in Mexico under suspicious circumstances -- cuts off the arms of his beloved mother, a possessive wife and religious fanatic who led a heretical church called "Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)," the members of which worshipped a martyred girl whose arms were severed by her father following her rape, and then commit suicide. Back in the present, buttressed by shock of his remembrance, he escapes the sanitarium and, in a series of hallucinations and dream-fulfillments, believes he has rejoined his armless mother. He "becomes her arms" and the "two" ...
Written by
Hallow Looyuh
Plot Synopsis:
-------------------

The film starts with a naked man named Fenix, sitting in a tree in a mental asylum. Nurses come out to him, bringing a plate of conventional food, which he refuses. When he is offered the plate of a raw fish, Fenix descends from the tree and eats as the nurses get him to put on some overalls.

FlashbackThe film flashes back into Fenix's childhood, which he spent performing as a "child magician" in a circus run by his father Orgo, the knife-thrower, and his mother Concha, a trapeze artist and aerialist. The circus crew also includes, among others, a tattooed woman, who acts as the object of Orgo's knife-throwing feats, her adopted daughter Alma (a hearing-impaired, voiceless mime and tightrope walker whom Fenix fancies, with the feeling mutual), Fenix's dwarf friend Aladin, a pack of clowns and a small elephant. Orgo carries on a very public flirtation with the tattooed woman, and their knife-throwing act is heavily sexualized.

Concha is also the leader of a religious cult that considers, as its patron saint, a little girl who was raped and had her arms cut off by two brothers. Their church is about to be bulldozed at the behest of the owner of the land, and the followers make one last stand against the police and the bulldozers. A Roman Catholic Monsignor drives into the conflict, saying that he will prevent its demolition, but after he enters the temple to inspect it he deems it blasphemous and unworthy (the girl worshipped is no saint, he says, and the supposed pool of "holy blood" at the center of the edifice contains just red paint), so the demolition is carried out. Fenix leads Concha back to the circus, where she finds out about Orgo's affair, but Orgo, being also a hypnotist, puts Concha in a trance and rapes her.

The circus elephant then dies, much to Fenix's grief, and a public funeral is conducted, in which the elephant is paraded through the city inside a giant casket. The casket is then dropped into the city dump, where scavengers open it up and proceed to carve up the elephant and take away the meat. Orgo consoles his son by tattooing a spread-eagled phoenix onto his chest, identical to the one on his own chest, using a knife dipped in red ink. This tattoo, Orgo says, will make Fenix a man.

Later on, Concha, during her trapeze act, sees Orgo and the tattooed woman sneak out of the big top. She chases after them and, seeing them sexually engaged, pours a bottle of sulphuric acid onto Orgo's genitals. Orgo retaliates by cutting off both her arms (much like the girl previously venerated). He then walks into the street and slits his own throat. Fenix witnesses this, locked inside a trailer. He then sees the tattooed woman driving off with Alma.

Flash-forwardBack in the present, Fenix is taken out to a movie theater, along with other patients, most of whom have Down syndrome. A pimp intercepts them and persuades them to take cocaine and follow him to meet an overweight prostitute. Fenix then spots the Tattooed Woman, who is now a prostitute, and becomes filled with rage. Back in the asylum, Fenix's armless mother Concha calls out for him from the street and he escapes by climbing down a rope from his cell window. The Tattooed Woman is shown trying to prostitute Alma, who runs away and sleeps on the roof of a truck. The Tattooed Woman is then mutilated and killed by the hands of unseen woman.

Mother and son go on to perform an act whereby he stands behind her and moves his arms so that they appear to be Concha's arms that are moving. But Concha soon starts to use her son's hands to kill those women whom she deems a threat to her, including a young performer that he kills with a knife-throw, as well as a cross-dressing wrestler, whom he slashes with a katana. A dream sequence subsequently shows that he has killed many more women, all of whose memories haunt him.

Alma finds Fenix and together they plan to run away from Concha and her house. She tries to force Fenix to murder Alma as well, but, after a struggle, he manages to plunge a knife into Concha's stomach. Yet she does not die but taunts him by saying she will always be inside him as she vanishes before his eyes. Through a quick series of flashbacks, it is revealed that Concha actually died after being maimed by Orgo, and that Fenix has actually kept a mannequin of his armless mother for performing on stage and at home, which also now appears in reality to be a thoroughly dilapidated house. He destroys the home-made temple and throws away the mannequin with the help of his imaginary childhood friends, Aladin and the clowns.

Alma proceeds to lead Fenix outside the house where police are waiting and order them to put up their hands. As they both comply, Fenix watches his own hands in awe as he does so. And Fenix's realization that he has finally regained control of them brings him joy and peace.

0