The director of "Birdman" and "The Revenant" returns to his native Mexico to confront personal and national legacies.

The feature debut by Michelle Garza Cervera is most engaging when it drills down into starkly human anxieties.

As if responding to the pair of notable December releases with surrogate father-daughter storylines – Paul Greengrass’s “News of the World” and George Clooney’s “Midnight Sky” – Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s feature directorial debut “Identifying Features” briefly unites a woman and a young man on parallel searches for long-lost relatives. She is Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), who is beginning to believe her son may be dead. He is Miguel (David Illescas), who is hoping against hope that his own mother is not. And while they’re together for only a few heartbreaking scenes in Valadez’s striking drama about searchers who become wanderers (called "Sin Señas Particulares" in Spanish) , the bond is emotionally informed to a sharper pitch than either of those two aforementioned Hollywood projects.