Paolo Tizon’s Karlovy Vary-bowing film chronicles the efforts of young men training to serve in an area where drug trafficking takes place.

You’ll probably be exhausted by the end of Paolo Tizon’s documentary observing young men, many of them teenagers, participating in a highly rigorous training program conducted by the Peruvian military. The filmmaker spent ten months embedded with the recruits hoping to serve as soldiers in the region known as VRAEM, where much of the country’s coca plants are grown and drug trafficking takes place. Night Has Come, receiving its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, immerses you in the recruits’ training so thoroughly that you come away feeling as if you’ve gone through it yourself.

The training is brutal and frequently dangerous, as evidenced by one of the film’s most intense scenes, in which a trainee accidentally gets shot in the chest and has to be stabilized in the field. At one point, three recruits, jeeringly referred to by the other men as “The Three Stooges,” are forced to engage in a series of exercises while carrying a heavy tree trunk emblazoned with the phrase “Pain is Temporary.”

Tizon, here making his feature debut, takes pains to show that his subjects, aspiring to be fierce warriors in one of the most dangerous regions of Latin America, are also ordinary young men at heart, plagued by girlfriend problems and avidly watching war movies on their phones. The poignant moments in which they reveal their youthful insecurities stand in stark contrast to the physical rigors and harsh military mindset to which they’re being subjected. It’s clear that the filmmaker, who handled the photographic duties himself with striking results, succeeded in his goal of becoming close to these men and making them feel free to expose their innermost feelings.    

Night Has Come definitely provides a visceral, immersive experience, but it’s also marred by many boringly banal stretches, including lengthy segments in which we see the recruits working out in the gym or playfully roughhousing in the waters of a canal. Although the film runs only 95 minutes, it feels significantly longer and would probably have benefited from some judicious pruning. But then again, its punishing duration pales in comparison to the trials faced by its young subjects, who are intent on dedicating themselves to lives marked by intense discipline and extreme danger.