Dominican director Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias weaves together documentary and fiction as a megaherbivore looks back on being a stranger in a strange land.

When Pablo Escobar was killed in an exchange of gunfire with Colombian special forces in 1993, the “Cocaine King” left behind a private menagerie that included four hippopotami. By 2007, the herd had grown to 16 hippos that lived free and continued to multiply in the Magdalena River and surrounding lands, gradually being perceived as a threat to local farmers and fishermen. One rogue male who had split from the herd, christened “Pepe” by the media, was killed two years later by hunters acting under instruction from the authorities. Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias spins an idiosyncratic version of that story in Pepe.

While TV news clips, walkie talkie transmissions and audio of machine gun fire touch on the death of Escobar, De los Santos Arias expects viewers to connect the dots between the drug lord and Pepe, without providing much concrete information. Instead, he veers off into the voiceover thoughts of the hippo narrator, marveling at the unfamiliar language coming out of his mouth, at the stories he seems to know instinctively, and puzzling over his origins while knowing for certain only that he’s already dead. 

The title beast’s intermittent narration shifts at various points from Afrikaans to the Namibian Bantu language Mbukushu to Castilian, often accompanied by his fellow hippos grunting and mooing. Pepe even vocalizes vowel sounds like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.

The film jumps into nature-doc mode when the creature visualizes his ancestral roots in southwest Africa along the Okavango River in the first of many stunning drone shots, this one capturing a hippo herd’s bodies glistening like smooth stones in shallow water. While a detour with a German tourist group is clunky, we learn through their local guide that the hippo is a wise animal with intimate knowledge of both water and land, and that despite its considerable girth, it can move faster than any of us.

De los Santos Arias seems most in his element working impressionistically with image-based storytelling, effectively so when the sound of approaching helicopters causes the herd to flee into the river. We see the choppers only in the shadow they cast on the land, returning in the opposite direction hauling large crates. When the captured hippos are transferred to a Caribbean cargo boat — “bound for the unknown in a floating machine” — Pepe again wonders how he knows this story. Perhaps he intuited it in the eyes of the herd’s elders or the scratches and scars on their aged bodies?

The stoner truckdrivers tasked with transporting the illegally imported animals once they get back on land are instructed to tell any police who stop them that they are carrying Dominican wild pigs. Once the cargo is delivered to the estate of the unseen but clearly shady boss, Pepe observes: “That’s how my parents arrived at this river and sealed my fate.” Already, farm workers have begun embellishing the legend of the hippos’ entry into Colombia, describing their delivery in a massive plane that looked like a flying whale.

The narration again gets a bit flowery as Pepe reflects on the curse of proximity to “the two-legged,” as he describes humans. Some parsing of pronoun semantics, for instance, prompts a bit of eye-rolling as the hippo rolls the word “they” around in his mouth: “A ‘they’ that could be ‘us,’ or a ‘they’ that strips all possibility of ‘us’?”

The film skips through the leadership change of the still-growing herd once Pepe’s father shows signs of weakening and his older brother seizes power, beginning a reign of terror that eventually sees Pepe exiled. Ghostly images of a hippo skeleton as Pepe contemplates the loss of his father presage his own death.