Javier Bardem gives his scariest performance since No Country For Old Men in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's disquieting new film about emotional abuse. The Spanish director, known for 2023's rural noir The Beasts, presents a meditation on male auteurs entirely without sentimentality.
Bardem plays Esteban, a celebrated Oscar and Cannes Palme-winning movie director. In the film's increasingly disturbing sequences, he reveals himself to be in the throes of an opaque midlife crisis. Married with two children, he reconnects with his grown-up daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) after years of estrangement, offering her the lead in his new film about Spain's colonial exploitation of western Sahara.
The tense lunch meeting sets the tone: Esteban, now sober, gaslights Emilia about a traumatic childhood memory involving Kill Bill: Volume 2. Despite her anger, she accepts the role. On set, Esteban's coercive and controlling behaviour escalates, culminating in an almost unwatchable violent meltdown during repeated takes in the burning sun.
Sorogoyen's film is a fierce rejection of starry-eyed movie-making and a gripping psychological study of father-daughter confrontation. It raises unsettling questions: has Emilia accepted the role to force her father to confront his guilt? Or has Esteban devised the entire project to subdue his daughter, making her grateful and submissive?
Bardem and Luengo deliver outstanding performances in this tremendously alarming drama, which premiered at Cannes alongside Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland, marking a year of father-daughter dysfunction on the Croisette.
