The 2011 documentary El Velador (The Night Watchman) has no scenes of graphic violence, yet its subject is the unending drug war in Mexico. Nor are there interviews or voiceovers providing context. Instead, the film silently follows Martin, the guard of a grand mausoleum for deceased drug lords then under construction in Sinaloa. Scratchy snippets of radio broadcast instances of the ongoing violence—shootings, torture, beheadings—that claimed 21,000 lives in the three years leading up to…