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A film about the religious cost of conquest could easily flatten into a simple morality tale, either the missionaries as villains or the old religion as a romanticized loss. The critics who reviewed The Other Conquest on its release did not read it that way. Aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes with an 85 percent score across 13 reviews, the film was met by professional critics at named American daily papers with a consistency worth naming individually rather than only as a percentage.
Kevin Thomas, writing in the Los Angeles Times, praised director Salvador Carrasco for creating a dazzling vision of the birth of a uniquely Mexican religion through the fusion of Catholic and Aztec belief, treating the syncretism itself as the film's real subject. David Elliott, in the San Diego Union-Tribune, called the film a grand mural of trauma exploring how masters and vassals together forged the hot core of Mexican Catholicism, a phrase that credits both sides with authorship of what resulted rather than crediting only the conquerors. Marjorie Baumgarten, in the Austin Chronicle, called it a marvelous vision, at once spectacle, history lesson and psychological drama, and Ron Stringer, in L.A. Weekly, wrote that lead actor Damian Delgado's performance carried the film beyond period exoticism to a genuine illumination of social and sacred history alike.
Read together, the named critical response treats the film's religious fusion not as tragedy alone but as the founding fact of a culture, the same reading the film itself, through its scribe protagonist's unresolved conversion, seems built to invite.