The Similars

• Writer-director Isaac Ezban deliberately set the film during the night of October 2, 1968 — the date Mexican security forces opened fire on student protesters at Tlatelolco — using it as a science-fiction metaphor for conformity and enforced sameness, in the tradition of the socially-conscious sci-fi he grew up on. He's also said on record the film "was never meant to be a political movie or a polemic" — just an entertaining thriller with that history in the background.
• The Similars world-premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin on September 25, 2015, then screened at Sitges, where it won the Blood Window Award for Best Latin American Feature.
• The transformation effects weren't a single trick — they combined body-doubling (actors made up and blocked to read as copies of star Gustavo Sánchez Parra's character Ulises), practical prosthetic makeup, and visual effects work, credited to a multi-person makeup/SFX/VFX team.
• US distribution was handled by XLrator Media, which put the film on cable VOD before a digital and iTunes release on November 22, 2016 — not a wide theatrical run.
• Cassandra Ciangherotti's pregnant character Irene, fleeing an abusive husband, dies giving birth during the chaos at the station — and her baby is born already wearing the cloned face.

The 'similars' aren't aliens or monsters — they're the Mexican government's way of making dissent invisible. The faces that replace the originals represent state erasure of individual identity, and the Tlatelolco framing turns the whole body-horror premise into a metaphor for political disappearance.

Irene's pregnancy is the one thing the phenomenon can't fully erase — her baby is born already wearing the cloned face, but a new life still enters the world in the middle of a night built around erasure, which is either the film's one flicker of hope or its cruelest joke.

Ignacio is the key to the whole thing: he's the one character confirmed to walk away still remembering what happened, and he spends the film clutching a comic book about aliens who steal humanity's individuality — basically the movie's own plot handed to him as a bedtime story. Make of that framing device what you will.

Eight strangers stranded at a remote Mexican bus station on October 2, 1968 start noticing something wrong with their faces. One by one, they're pulled into a nightmare of identity theft that owes less to Invasion of the Body Snatchers than to a Twilight Zone episode soaked in blood and paranoia. Ezban traps his cast in a single suffocating set and cranks the existential dread until everyone's screaming about who's really who. The date matters: the Tlatelolco massacre haunts every frame, turning a sci-fi body-horror riddle into a political allegory about erasure, conformity, and what a government can make disappear.