A quote from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus declaring all the world to be hell sets the mood for this 1977 Mexican drama. A young woman and her flamboyantly gay father, who preside over a whorehouse in a decaying village, face a crisis with the arrival of the young woman’s former lover, a macho thug with repressed homosexual desires. Director Arturo Ripstein turns the house and village into a heavily charged metaphorical space in which the characters act out their tortured relationships; this recalls the psychological perversity of Fassbinder, but without his giddy sadism it lapses into overheated melodrama. In Spanish with subtitles. 110 min.