The Principle
Gabriel Beristain operates from a place of controlled aggression. His images are never accidental. Trained in the rich tradition of Mexican cinematography and sharpened by years of collaboration with auteurs as distinct as Derek Jarman and Guillermo del Toro, Beristain developed a visual language that refuses to choose between beauty and brutality. His work insists that these qualities are not opposites but complements, and his best images hold both in perfect, uncomfortable tension.
What separates Beristain from cinematographers who simply "make action movies look good" is his persistent interest in the body as a compositional element. Whether he is shooting the near-balletic vampire combat of Blade II, the sunbaked institutional corridors of S.W.A.T., or the coiled domestic menace of The Ring Two, Beristain frames human figures with the same sculptural attention a painter might give to a figure study. Characters exist in space with weight and consequence. His frames never feel populated; they feel considered.
Beristain's years working alongside del Toro on Blade II were formative in crystallizing his approach to genre space. Del Toro's insistence on designed environments — every room built as a visual argument — pushed Beristain to treat the cinematography as an active participant in world-building rather than a passive recorder. The result was a visual system where lighting architecture, camera placement, and production design spoke a unified language. This collaborative instinct carried forward through his work with David Ayer on Street Kings, where the same principles were applied to sun-scorched Los Angeles police procedural territory.
Finally, Beristain is a cinematographer who understands that restraint is a form of power. His most commercially aggressive work — the kinetic sequences in Blade: Trinity, the pursuit photography in S.W.A.T. — lands harder because of what he withholds in the quieter moments. He builds contrast not only with light, but with pacing and visual density. The loud moments mean something because the quiet ones were genuinely quiet.
Camera and Movement
Beristain favors a camera that is alive but not restless. On Blade II, he and del Toro established a grammar where the camera moved with deliberate purpose — pushing into a character to signal encroaching threat, craning away to expose environmental scale and isolation — but never simply for the sake of motion. The handheld work, when deployed, feels earned. It is a tool reserved for moments of genuine destabilization: a fight that has turned ugly, an emotional confrontation that has exceeded a character's control. When the camera shakes in a Beristain frame, the audience understands something has broken loose.
His framing preferences lean toward the medium and medium-long range, keeping the full figure — or close to it — in the composition. This is partly a reflection of his interest in the body as a visual element, and partly a practical commitment to geography. In the action sequences of S.W.A.T. and Blade: Trinity, you always know where you are, who is where, and how far they are from danger. Spatial clarity is a moral value in Beristain's action photography. He trusts wide lenses to carry energy without sacrificing readability, and his close-ups are therefore more impactful for being rationed.
In his quieter dramatic work — the procedural investigation sequences in Street Kings, the suburban dread passages in The Ring Two — Beristain often locks the camera into stillness entirely, allowing the environment to do expressive work. A static wide shot held a beat too long accumulates unease. He understands that stillness in cinema is never neutral; a camera that refuses to move is making a statement about the immovability of fate, circumstance, or character. This disciplined range — from fluid action grammar to anchored dramatic stillness — gives his work unusual emotional bandwidth.
Light
Beristain's lighting philosophy is rooted in the idea that light has source logic and that breaking that logic is an expressive choice, not a lazy one. His first instinct is always to find the light that already exists in a space — practical lamps, window spill, the orange wash of streetlight — and build from there. This approach is most visible in Street Kings, where the Los Angeles locations were photographed in a way that preserved and intensified their existing tonal quality: bleached daylight, the jaundiced glow of convenience store fluorescents, the deep blue of pre-dawn streets. The light never lies about where you are.
For Blade II, Beristain and del Toro developed a signature language of underlighting and hard rim separation that gave the film its distinctive gothic-industrial character. Characters are frequently lit from below or from extreme side angles, carving faces into planes of highlight and shadow. This expressionistic approach — clearly descended from the German Expressionist lighting tradition and filtered through del Toro's monster-movie sensibility — served the material's heightened reality. The Reapers and their underground world needed to feel genuinely infernal, and Beristain delivered that through lighting geometry rather than through digital manipulation. The work is physical and photographic in the most fundamental sense.
In his Marvel Cinematic Universe work on the Agent Carter television series, Beristain adapted this approach to serve period aesthetics, working with warm, practical-source-motivated lighting that evoked the late-1940s world while maintaining enough contrast and depth to keep the images cinematically alive. This flexibility — moving between the operatic darkness of Blade II and the warm period elegance of Agent Carter — speaks to a cinematographer whose lighting vocabulary is genuinely deep rather than stylistically branded.
Color and Texture
Beristain is drawn to desaturation as a form of emotional truth-telling. His palettes are rarely lush or broadly warm; instead they tend toward the reduced, the cooled, the slightly drained. In Street Kings, this produces a Los Angeles that feels morally exhausted, its colors wrung out by heat and institutional corruption. The blues are steely rather than romantic, the daylight scenes bleached to near-monochrome in their brightest exposures. Color in this film is not decorative; it is diagnostic.
Blade II represents the other pole of his color thinking — a world where desaturation is applied to the human environments while the supernatural elements are rendered in deeper, more saturated reds and ochres. Blood reads as genuinely vivid against the cool industrial backgrounds, a contrast that is viscerally effective and symbolically loaded. Beristain understands that color works relationally; a red means nothing without the grey that surrounds it. This principle — color as contrast rather than color as decoration — runs through everything he shoots.
His approach to texture favors the material and the photographic. He tends toward images that feel like they exist in a physical world, with the grain, shadow detail, and specular highlight behavior of film photography even when working digitally. The Bound by Honor era work has a rawness and grain texture that grounds its barrio and prison environments in documentary-adjacent reality. Even in his most stylized work, there is a tactile quality — you feel like you could touch the surfaces he photographs. This commitment to material texture prevents his more expressionistic choices from ever floating away into pure abstraction.
Signature Techniques
- Hard Rim Separation Against Dark Environments: Beristain consistently uses aggressive backlight and rim lighting to separate figures from dark, low-key backgrounds, a technique most fully developed in Blade II that gives action subjects a three-dimensional sculptural presence even in high-energy sequences.
- Practical Source Motivation in Location Work: Whether in the Los Angeles interiors of Street Kings or the suburban settings of The Ring Two, Beristain builds his lighting schemes from identifiable practical sources within the frame, preserving environmental specificity and grounding heightened content in recognizable reality.
- Static Frames as Dread Accumulation: Particularly in dramatic and horror-adjacent sequences, Beristain will hold a wide or medium static frame for an extended beat, allowing silence and stillness to generate unease rather than reaching for camera movement to manufacture tension.
- Spatial Geography in Action Sequences: Across S.W.A.T., Blade II, and Blade: Trinity, Beristain maintains rigorous spatial legibility in complex action sequences through careful axis management and wide-lens coverage, ensuring that physical stakes are always comprehensible even at peak intensity.
- Desaturated Base with Isolated Color Emphasis: A recurring color strategy in which the overall palette is cooled and reduced in saturation, allowing a specific, narratively significant color — most often red or amber — to carry disproportionate visual and emotional weight.
- Underlighting for Expressionistic Character Studies: Influenced by del Toro's production design philosophy, Beristain periodically employs below-eyeline or extreme low-angle light sources to sculpt faces in ways that destabilize conventional portraiture and signal moral or psychological extremity.
- Period-Authentic Lighting Warmth in MCU Work: In the Agent Carter series, Beristain developed a rigorous approach to warm, incandescent-quality practical lighting that communicates period authenticity without sacrificing depth or contrast, demonstrating an ability to subordinate personal stylistic tendencies to the demands of a specific historical and tonal world.