The story of Medea, the sorceress who murdered her children to punish their unfaithful father, has fascinated artists from Euripides to Pasolini. For his first feature shot digitally – indeed, the first in Latin America – Ripstein filmed Garcíadiego's adaptation of Seneca's Medea, transposed to the lower depths of contemporary Mexico City. The film is the fullest exploration to date of Garcíadiego's theme of motherhood as a double-edged sword – wounding both mothers and children but also capable of being turned against the outside world. The fatalism that underpins Ripstein's work and the theatricality of Garciadiego's here combine to present a mythic world embedded in the modern one. The film is as faithful to the theatrical unities of time, place and action as Seneca, and fate is as pitiless.