Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz’s Untamed Royals (Príncipes salvajes) follows wealthy Mexican teenagers whose crimes escalate from pranks to dangerous plans while the fallout lands on everyone but them.

Untamed Royals (Príncipes salvajes) is a 2024 Mexican crime thriller made for Netflix, directed by Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz from a screenplay by Santiago Mohar Volkow. Juan Pablo Fuentes, Ximena Lamadrid, Fernando Cattori and Renata Manterola lead the cast, with Alfonso Herrera billed in a special appearance. The film premiered on Netflix on Wednesday 28 August 2024 and runs 99 minutes.

Its premise fits inside a single line of the official synopsis: a group of wealthy young people commit crimes that escalate from petty mischief to genuinely dangerous plans, with consequences for everyone except themselves. That last clause is the engine of the whole project. On paper, this is less a story about whether a handful of rich teenagers will get caught than a story about who gets hurt in their place.

What the film is about

At the centre are Xavier, played by Juan Pablo Fuentes, and Gerardo, played by Fernando Cattori, two friends shielded by the money and influence of their families. As described in the coverage published around the release, their first scheme is a robbery staged at home: the loot is the watches and cash of one of their own fathers, and the people left to absorb the suspicion are the household employees, not the sons.

From there the crimes climb. Ximena Lamadrid plays Mariana and Renata Manterola plays Renata, part of the same circle, and the group’s appetite for risk grows faster than any sense of who pays for it. When one of the robberies goes wrong, an investigator played by Alfonso Herrera, credited as Rodrigo Majárrez, begins to put the pieces together. Caraly Sánchez, Itzel Quintal, Ana Wills and Francisco Rubio complete the supporting cast. Beyond that point the plot is better left to the film itself, and nothing here goes further than what Netflix and the release-week coverage made public.

The director and the writer

Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz has spent the last decade moving between features and premium streaming television. His credits include the feature Oveja negra and the road movie Camino a Marte (2017), episodes of Luis Miguel: The Series, Netflix’s Las viudas de los jueves (2023), adapted from Claudia Piñeiro’s novel about the residents of a gated community, and the Prime Video series ¿Quién lo mató? (2024), about the 1999 killing of the television host Paco Stanley. Untamed Royals sits in the same territory: the comfortable Mexican household, and the people around it, as the setting for a crime.

Santiago Mohar Volkow came to the project as a director in his own right, with features such as Los muertos (2014) behind him. His script is built on a class premise rather than a heist premise. The question it poses is not how the crimes are done, but who ends up carrying them: the domestic staff, the outsiders, anyone without a surname that opens doors.

The film is a BH5 and Tigre Pictures production, with Pablo García Gatterer and Rodrigo Trujillo among its producers. Marc Bellver, who also shot Las viudas de los jueves and ¿Quién lo mató? for Hinojosa, is the director of photography, Sam Baixauli edited it and Rodrigo Dávila Chapoy composed the score. In practice, much of the director’s regular television team followed him to this feature.

A cast that mixes a star with new faces

Alfonso Herrera is the most recognisable name in the credits. He first became famous through the telenovela Rebelde and the band RBD, then built an international career with series such as Sense8, The Exorcist and Ozark, Mexican films such as El baile de los 41 and ¡Que viva México!, and Zack Snyder’s two Rebel Moon films. In Untamed Royals he plays the adult on the other side of the story, an investigator in a film otherwise built around people who have never been asked to answer for anything.

The four leads are younger. Ximena Lamadrid had already played the title role in Netflix’s ¿Quién mató a Sara?, another story about the secrets of a powerful Mexican family, and appeared in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022). Juan Pablo Fuentes arrived from the Netflix adventure series Bandidos, released earlier in 2024. Fernando Cattori and Renata Manterola complete the group of friends at the heart of the story.

A very Mexican subject

Mexico has a word for the type the film puts on screen: mirreyes, the slang term for the ostentatious sons and daughters of wealth whose excesses play out in public and on social media. The journalist Ricardo Raphael gave the phenomenon a full book, Mirreynato (2014), about inequality seen from the very top. Untamed Royals takes that figure and pushes it into crime: inherited money, no visible limits, and a trail of damage left for others to clean up.

Mexican cinema has circled this class for years. Alejandra Márquez Abella’s Las niñas bien (2018) followed a society wife through the 1982 debt crisis, and Michel Franco’s Nuevo orden (2020) imagined a popular uprising crashing a wealthy family’s wedding. The premise of privileged young people playing with other people’s lives also invites comparison with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), which Haneke remade in English in 2007, although by its own synopsis Untamed Royals moves towards the police thriller rather than the home-invasion nightmare.

How it landed on Netflix

Netflix presented the film in August 2024 as part of its “Que México se vea” slate of Mexican productions, the same campaign that previewed Rodrigo Prieto’s adaptation of Pedro Páramo and the comedy Technoboys. Released on Wednesday 28 August, Untamed Royals reached number two in Netflix’s global Top 10 for non-English films in its first week, to 1 September, with 2.4 million views and four million hours watched. It stayed on the list for a second week, at number nine with 800,000 views.

That first week it also entered the national Top 10 in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Poland. The run was short, two weeks on the global chart, but the film has kept resurfacing: two years after its premiere it was still turning up in Latin American streaming roundups, often framed around its adult content as much as its plot.

Our take

What Untamed Royals offers on paper is a familiar genre frame, a crime thriller with an investigator closing in, attached to a pointed question about who pays for the crimes of the rich. Whether it leans further towards social commentary or towards straightforward genre entertainment is the tension built into the premise, and each viewer will settle it differently.

The draw is the combination: a director with recent experience in Mexican true crime and society drama, a writer from auteur cinema, a cast that pairs Alfonso Herrera’s recognition with a younger generation of Mexican actors, and a story more interested in collateral damage than in comeuppance. At 99 minutes, it is a contained proposition, and one of the more talked-about Mexican Netflix films of 2024.

Tags: Netflix, Mexico