The right to remain opaque: non-human subjectivity and experimental form in Pepe (2024)

This article examines Pepe (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias, 2024) as an experiment in non-human representation and cinematic form. Rejecting conventional narrative and documentary forms, the film resists rendering the ‘cocaine hippo’ legible within frameworks of empathy, allegory, or mastery. Drawing on the concept of right to opacity, response-ability, and posthuman assemblage, I argue that Pepe enacts a politics of refusal that is both aesthetic and ethical. Through fragmented temporality, haptic visuality, and polyphonic voiceover, the film dislocates subjectivity across species, histories, and geographies, disorienting the spectator without offering resolution or closure. Instead of casting the hippo as a symbol or victim, the film sustains his spectral presence, maintaining a deliberate obscurity that exceeds comprehension or possession. Pepe challenges colonial and anthropocentric demands for transparency, aligning with a broader lineage of experimental cinema that unsettles the politics of visibility. This refusal of clarity is not the absence of meaning but an invitation to remain with non-human life in its unresolved material and ethical complexity.