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  • The Shrouds review – precision filmmaking of the…



    It’s become a cliché to say that David Cronenberg’s The Fly remains one of the most heart­break­ing films of the 1980s, a film which cul­mi­nates in an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist hav­ing to put down her sci­en­tist boyfriend for being too overzeal­ous with his toys. With his rumi­na­tive lat­est, The Shrouds, Cro­nen­berg once more makes a play for the heart­strings in what must be one of the most naked­ly mov­ing and rev­e­la­to­ry films with­in his canon.

    There is, of course, a lot of iron­ic lev­i­ty too, as seen in an open­ing sequence in which melan­choly wid­owed tech mag­nate, Karsh (Vin­cent Cas­sell, made up to look exact­ly like the film­mak­er), decides to dive into the dat­ing scene once more, organ­is­ing a lunch with a match for­mu­lat­ed by his den­tist in a restau­rant that’s adja­cent to a grave­yard. The joke is, it’s his restau­rant. And his grave­yard. And what’s more, his late wife, Bec­ci, is buried there – would you, dear date, like to come and see her decay­ing corpse in 8K res­o­lu­tion via live-relay videofeed?

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    Karsh is the founder of GraveTech, a com­pa­ny who have, in tan­dem with a Chi­nese firm named Shin­ing Cloth, devel­oped a new type of bur­ial shroud which allows the bereaved to be in con­stant con­tact with the recent­ly depart­ed. Ever the roman­tic, Karsh is just itch­ing to dive into his plot next to Bec­ci so they may enter the eter­nal rest togeth­er, but in the mean­time, he’s can zoom in on her des­ic­cat­ing skull and won­der­ing what those lit­tle nod­ules grow­ing on her bones might be.

    Explo­rations of grief on film are ten a pen­ny and so often lean on maudlin sen­ti­ment to achieve their intend­ed goal. The Shrouds offers some­thing that’s at once more nuanced, more com­plex and more rad­i­cal, as Karsh finds him­self hav­ing to deal with the fact that some­one may be sab­o­tag­ing his sys­tem to use it as a sur­veil­lance tool, some­thing one of his oper­a­tives and ex-broth­er-in-law Mau­ry (Guy Pearce) may have a hand in. This cen­tral con­ceit of man attempt­ing to dis­cov­er the prove­nance of strange broad­cast images and being swept into a world of polit­i­cal intrigue is a ful­some call-back to 1983’s Video­drome, and as a film about a husband’s con­spir­a­to­r­i­al obses­sions with his dead wife, there’s quite a bit of 1991’s Naked Lunch in there too.

    On a pro­duc­tion lev­el, this is just pre­ci­sion film­mak­ing of the high­est stripe, and there’s a heart­beat-like rhythm to both the syn­tax and syn­co­pa­tions of the dia­logue, and the beau­ti­ful­ly judged shot/​reverse shot edits. Howard Shore deliv­ers anoth­er one of his gor­geous synth scores, this one with an apt­ly fune­re­al vibe, and long-time pro­duc­tion design­er Car­ol Spi­er threads the nee­dle between a world of pris­tine mod­ern inno­va­tion, and Japan­ese minimalism.

    The Shrouds is a new type of cin­e­mat­ic love sto­ry, one that deals with our abid­ing con­nec­tion with the dead through dreams and real­is­tic inno­va­tion rather than hav­ing to lean on such time­worn crutch­es as ghosts and fan­ta­sy. Like much of his late work, there are a cer­tain set of demands placed on the view­er, but if you’re will­ing to take what Cro­nen­berg is giv­ing you and tap into the film’s rich emo­tion­al main­frame, then the gifts (and heart­break) will be plentiful.





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  • F1 The Movie – Review


    During lockdown, Netflix’s Drive to Survive brought Formula 1 into the homes of millions of people who had never before…

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  • 28 Years Later – Review


    28 Years Later marks a much anticipated  return to the franchise, with Alex Garland and Danny Boyle once again at…

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  • F1 review – speed is king, subtlety is…

    F1 review – speed is king, subtlety is…



    There’s no point in deny­ing it. No use pre­tend­ing oth­er­wise. By any rea­son­able met­ric or mea­sure, it remains a sim­ple and immutable truth: men are class. And yes, dudes do, in fact, rock.

    This is the most log­i­cal and self-evi­dent con­clu­sion to draw from F1: The Movie, a tur­bo-charged Dad Movie par excel­lence in which Brad Pitt’s star in an unrea­son­ably priced car proves that some­times the old ways are the best. Pitt plays Son­ny Hayes, a one­time For­mu­la One prodi­gy turned world-weary rent-a-wheel­man, who is lured out of retire­ment for one last ride by his old friend and for­mer team­mate Ruben Cer­vantes (Javier Bar­dem), now the own­er of the strug­gling APXGP team.

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    Hayes is brought in to men­tor the team’s num­ber-one dri­ver, Joshua Pearce (Dam­son Idris), a promis­ing rook­ie whose F1 career is in dan­ger of stalling before it has real­ly begun. But it’s not long before Hayes starts assert­ing his alpha male­ness all over the team garage, charm­ing the pants (lit­er­al­ly, in one case) off every­one from the mechan­ics to the press offi­cer to the most influ­en­tial mem­ber of the board. Every­one, that is, except Pearce, whose eager­ness to best his new de fac­to rival will have dis­as­trous con­se­quences – not just for him, but for the entire team.

    Direc­tor Joseph Kosin­s­ki and screen­writer Ehren Kruger, who pre­vi­ous­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed on 2022’s Top Gun: Mav­er­ick, are reunit­ed here to sim­i­lar­ly earnest, chest-thump­ing effect. Aside from a few brief glimpses into Pearce’s home life and a some­what laboured roman­tic sub­plot between Hayes and Ker­ry Condon’s Kate McKen­na (hailed as F1’s first female tech­ni­cal direc­tor), their script most­ly cuts to the chase – which is handy for a film whose run­time exceeds the aver­age length of an F1 race. Kosin­s­ki and Kruger know exact­ly what their audi­ence wants: dar­ing over­takes, late break­ing, sparks fly­ing, spec­tac­u­lar crash­es – and lots of it.

    Indeed, the mid­dle por­tion of the film plays out like an extend­ed rac­ing mon­tage, the action furi­ous­ly jump­ing from cir­cuit to cir­cuit – Spa, Mon­za, Las Vegas, Suzu­ka – as Hayes and Pearce begin steadi­ly work­ing their way up the grid. They are aid­ed by a chas­sis upgrade, devel­oped by McKen­na and designed to let them dri­ve through dirty air, and some good old-fash­ioned race­craft. The reck­less tac­tics and brazen skull­dug­gery employed by Hayes are car­ried off with a know­ing wink and a toothy grin, but are also plain­ly ludi­crous – to the extent you may end up park­ing your sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Still, when the results are this thrilling, it seems churl­ish to nit­pick about such fan­ci­ful nar­ra­tive manoeuvres.

    Made with the full back­ing of the sport’s omnipo­tent gov­ern­ing body, the FIA, many key scenes were filmed dur­ing the 2023 and 2024 British Grand Prix events, with Pitt and Idris dri­ving adapt­ed For­mu­la Two cars in between actu­al prac­tice ses­sions. The footage cap­tured over those week­ends – par­tic­u­lar­ly the in-car, first-per­son POV shots – is aston­ish­ing. Unless you’ve dri­ven in F1 pro­fes­sion­al­ly, this is as close as you’re ever like­ly to get to the feel­ing of hit­ting 200 mph down Silverstone’s icon­ic Hangar Straight.

    Yet the FIA’s involve­ment also means that, even more than the strong smell of Brut, burnt rub­ber and testos­terone, the film has the unmis­tak­able whiff of an expen­sive, sani­tised PR exer­cise. Sev­er­al real-life big names from the For­mu­la One pad­dock – includ­ing reign­ing World Cham­pi­on Max Ver­stap­pen, sev­en-time champ Lewis Hamil­ton (who also has a pro­duc­er cred­it on the film) and team prin­ci­pals such as Mer­cedes’ Toto Wolff and Ferrari’s Fred Vasseur – appear in back­ground cameo roles as them­selves. Not to men­tion a num­ber of offi­cials and even a few state dignitaries.

    For added authen­tic­i­ty, the GP scenes are accom­pa­nied by broad­cast­ing stal­warts David Croft and Mar­tin Brun­dle, whose inces­sant expo­si­tion­al com­men­tary is like­ly to grate on sea­soned fans, but should help casu­al view­ers grasp the fin­er details of what is an extreme­ly tech­ni­cal sport. What is miss­ing – albeit under­stand­ably – is any attempt to grap­ple with the eth­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing For­mu­la One, from accu­sa­tions of sports­wash­ing to con­cerns about its envi­ron­men­tal impact, work­place mis­con­duct, and per­son­al alle­ga­tions made against var­i­ous senior fig­ures with­in the sport and its par­ent organisation.

    All top­ics wor­thy of wider dis­cus­sion, but per­haps not in a film like this – where speed is king and sub­tle­ty is yel­low-flagged; where cold real­i­ty fin­ish­es a dis­tant sec­ond to the white-hot fan­ta­sy of a glob­al prod­uct that, as evi­denced by Netflix’s wild­ly pop­u­lar docu­d­ra­ma Dri­ve to Sur­vive, is engi­neered to con­tin­u­ous­ly fuel its own hype machine. If you’re look­ing for a seri­ous win­dow into the high-stakes, cut­throat world of For­mu­la One, you cer­tain­ly won’t find it here. So stick on that Fleet­wood Mac CD, grab those vin­tage Dun­hill avi­a­tors, and strap your­self in. As the late, great Mur­ray Walk­er used to say – go, go, go, go!

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  • Tornado review – tries a bit too hard to be different


    A person in a dark grey cloak holding a sword stands in a forested area with tall trees.

    John Maclean aims for Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, but this 18th century samurai western leaves only a superficial impression.

    An entire decade has slipped by since the release of John Maclean’s debut feature, the frisky meta western Slow West, which, if nothing else, presented a savvy operator hankering to get his mitts dirty in the world of genre. His belated return to writing and directing retains a dash of eccentricity and a fondness for folding up and repurposing convention like it were a little origami bird, but this sadly feels a lot more like a roughedged first film than Slow West did way back when.

    Drawing on the macho, high-plains sagas of Sergio Leone as well as Akira Kurosawa’s games of psychological chess, Tornado follows a Japanese father-daughter duo trundling down the muddied byways of rural Scotland in the late 1700s and plying their trade as performers of a samurai-themed puppet show. She, named Tornado (Kōki), is bored with her lot, while he (Takehiro Hira), embraces the hushed nobility of this artisan profession.

    It’s not long before a hoard of gurning, grime-covered goons, each tooled-up with their own signature weapon, are chasing her across the landscape, because she pounced on the split-second opportunity to relieve them of two sacks of gold coins, the plunder from a criminal enterprise and en route to be divvyed out among them. The gang is led by Tim Roth’s Sugarman, who is basically Tim Roth were Tim Roth a poetically-inclined 18th century miscreant, who is at loggerheads with his son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), who wants nothing more than to get one over on his abusive pop and his pals. Maybe this snafu involving Tornado might be the right time to stick the knife in?

    You can see what Maclean is aiming for here, but it feels as if he’s carefully selected a few modest ingredients, and rather than combining them to concoct a subtle, gourmet dish, we have a few strong flavours that don’t really work in concert. The heist/chase mechanics are decent, but it’s all too schematic, and the twists are often stealthy plot devices rather than ways into the drama.

    On the atmospherics front, the film fares much better, with Robbie Ryan’s cinematography drawing out an autumnal haze of the spartan landscape, and some lovely little folksy production design embellishments from Elizabeth El-Kadhi. Part of the story takes in an encampment of travelling players, and the design of the mobile lodging and painted signage is a joy. It’s just a shame that these elements have so little to add to the story.

    The real problem here is a script which favours bathetic proclamations over any real desire to get under the skins of the characters. Tornado herself as the feisty heroine is tragically one dimensional, and the only real tension in the film derives from the testy father-son relationship between Roth and Lowden. And even that comes to a head in a way that’s both anticlimactic and illogical.

    It’s laudable that Maclean wants to breathe new life into unabashed “B” material, but unfortunately the idiosyncratic touches have usurped rather than bolstered what should be robust, time-honoured noir framework, and we’re left with a film which leaves only a superficial impression and little sense of purpose.

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  • Protein review – nasty, funny, soulful

    Protein review – nasty, funny, soulful


    A close-up of a shirtless man with a bloodied and bruised face, his expression stern and intense.

    A gang of small-town drug dealing gym rats are set upon by a murderous stranger in this satisfying Welsh genre piece.

    There are worse films to be obsessed with than Shane Meadows‘ Dead Man’s Shoes, and that film’s blood-flecked paw prints are all over writer/director Tony Burke’s witty, Welsh revenge yarn, Protein. The film cheekily adopts its title from the supposed nutritional qualities of human flesh among the more desperate echelons of the body building community, as our hooded, monosyllabic protagonist, Sion (Craig Russell), is in town to take out some tinpot trash and then feast on their freshly carved entrails.

    On the sidelines is kindly gym worker Katrina (Kezia Burrows) who attempts to befriend the shell-shocked Sion, and while he very much remains a closed book emotionally, he does offer her a secret assist by butchering a chauvinist local lout who’s giving her grief. In fact, the horror/slasher element of the film is perhaps the least interesting thing about it, as Burke builds up an ensemble of characters who are all more than mere functional bit-players serving a hackneyed plot.

    For example, two drug-dealing goons who work for a smarmy local kingpin are secret lovers who have been forced to conceal their relationship due to the air of unreconstructed machismo that pervades their grubby little community. Similarly, the two cops investigating this rash of disappearances come freighted with their own traumas, and an initially frosty relationship eventually thaws into something that’s rather toughing for a film that, in the main, focuses on violence, bigotry, exploitation, humiliation and which household tools are best for administering pain to your fellow man.

    The link to Dead Man’s Shoes doesn’t begin and end with its angular loner with zero moral scruples when it comes to offing his targets. Burke injects a much-needed hit of parochial humour into proceedings, exemplified by Steve Meo’s hilarious, hapless Kevin, a wannabe wideboy who loves nothing more than to play dress-up Travis Bickle in his bedroom and have yelled arguments with his (always off-camera) mother.

    There’re no wheels being reinvented here in terms of tone or narrative, but it is a very solid genre runaround that is elevated by its occasional and welcome lapses into soulful introversion. It’s highly satisfying to see a filmmaker transition from a career making music videos and shorts to a work which expends time and effort to flesh-out all of its characters – even if that flesh might be eventually eaten by its cannibalistically-inclined antihero.



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  • Lollipop review – a gut-punching debut

    Lollipop review – a gut-punching debut



    The past cou­ple of years have seen an influx of women film­mak­ers bring­ing time­ly, work­ing-class sto­ries to the big screen with lived rev­er­ence and fresh tal­ent, from Rocks to Scrap­per to Bird. The lat­est addi­tion to this new social real­ist niche is Lol­lipop, a gut-punch­ing debut from writer-direc­tor Daisy-May Hud­son. The film fol­lows Mol­ly (Posy Ster­ling), a young moth­er released from jail but placed in a dif­fer­ent prison when she tries to reunite with her chil­dren, who are being held in fos­ter care. She finds her­self in a hell­ish Catch-22: she can’t gain cus­tody of her chil­dren with­out a roof over her head, but she can’t get a house via state assis­tance because her kids don’t live with her.

    Hudson’s sharp film, inspired by her own expe­ri­ences, pas­sion­ate­ly takes aim at the pit­falls and para­dox­es of the social care sys­tem. After painful­ly short super­vised vis­its with her chil­dren and miss­ing out on key moments of their growth, Mol­ly reach­es a break­ing point. Hud­son iso­lates Mol­ly when her con­sci­en­tious smile cracks as, off-screen, the voic­es of social work­ers dic­tate that her chil­dren will remain in fos­ter care until she has sort­ed her­self out. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jaime Ack­royd frames Mol­ly through the worker’s legs, like the bars of a cell. Sterling’s restrained per­for­mance trans­forms into some­thing explo­sive; anger crum­bles into dev­as­ta­tion as the sys­tem repeat­ed­ly and harsh­ly fails her. ​“You need to do more for me,” she begs, only to be met with: ​“There’s noth­ing more I can do.”

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    Though some of the film’s most dev­as­tat­ing moments occur inside the coun­cil office, it’s also where Mol­ly reunites with her great­est sup­port­er, col­lege friend Ami­na (Idil Ahmed), who is liv­ing in a hos­tel for home­less fam­i­lies. Both women are sol­diers fight­ing with a fierce love for their chil­dren. Their sis­ter­hood inter­rupts the solemn tone as they find pock­ets of joy amid the dev­as­ta­tion, gos­sip­ing in bed and danc­ing to UK garage music.

    These moments high­light the dis­tinct absence of men in Lol­lipop, bar Molly’s 5‑year-old son Leo (Luke Howitt). The com­pan­ion­ship of oth­er women is the foun­da­tion of Molly’s life, under­scored by the chal­leng­ing rela­tion­ships with the all-women care work­ers or her over­bear­ing but inat­ten­tive moth­er, Sylvie (Ter­ri­Ann Cousins).

    The impres­sive nature of the per­form­ers is thanks to cast­ing direc­tor Lucy Pardee, who recog­nised Sterling’s pow­er­house lead­ing poten­tial but also dis­cov­ered the bril­liance of Tegan-Mia Stan­ley Rhoads. The lat­ter, who plays Molly’s 11-year-old daugh­ter Ava, takes cen­tre stage when she tear­ful­ly pleads with her moth­er to obey the rules to avoid get­ting in more trou­ble. But Mol­ly is des­per­ate. The moth­er-daugh­ter back-and-forths are sen­si­tive­ly penned and down­right heart-wrench­ing to wit­ness. It’s a stark reminder of the pain caused by a sys­tem that slash­es wel­fare spend­ing and demands a per­son to jump through hoops with their legs tied. Hudson’s film makes room to acknowl­edge that this is a fam­i­ly affair. Mol­ly is at the epi­cen­tre, but the rever­ber­a­tions impact every­one around her.

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  • How To Train Your Dragon review – never quite…

    How To Train Your Dragon review – never quite…



    Live-action remakes have come to dominate the kickoff of the summer movie season. Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the creative duo behind early 2000s animated hits Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, have gone their separate ways, each now attempting to win the hearts of longtime fans and a new generation of moviegoers through live-action adaptations of their beloved animated classics. While Sanders has stepped back into the recording booth to reprise the voice of his mischievous alien creation, Stitch, DeBlois takes the reins as director of DreamWorks’ first ever live-action remake, steering the project in its entirety.

    A live-action remake carries far more to answer for than an original film or even a sequel. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, the adaptation largely follows its source material beat for beat, raising the question: what does the use of real actors and CGI bring to the table that animation does not and can that added tangibility truly offer an experience that surpasses the magic the original still holds to this day?

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    Like everyone else in the Viking community on the Isle of Berk, Hiccup (Mason Thames) longs to prove himself by slaying the dragons that terrorize his village, setting rogue fires and making off with their livestock. But when he finally comes face-to-face with a Night Fury, one of the most feared and elusive breeds of dragon, the moment that should define his bravery once and for all reveals something deeper. Blade in hand, he falters, not out of fear, but out of empathy, and makes a choice that sets him on a path no one in his tribe could understand.

    Unlike his peers, such as Astrid (Nico Parker) – one of the tribe’s most promising young members – Hiccup struggles to meet the expectations of his father, Stoick, the tribe’s formidable chief. Time and again, Stoick is frustrated and embarrassed by his son’s perceived lack of toughness. But what Stoick doesn’t realize is that Hiccup’s empathy and inventive mind may be exactly what their community needs to survive.

    Slowly but surely, Hiccup begins to train and heal the Night Fury he names Toothless, inspired by the dragon’s retractable teeth and endearing, gummy expression. As fans of the original will remember, Toothless’s behavior was famously modeled after a cat, and this adaptation preserves that playful, curious energy, emphasizing the timeless dynamic of a boy and his pet. The bond that forms between Hiccup and Toothless remains the film’s undeniable heart, just as it was in the animated classic.



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  • The History of Sound – first-look review

    The History of Sound – first-look review



    When Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) meet over the top of a piano in a Boston college bar, the spark between them is instant. One is a talented vocal student, the other a composition major preoccupied with recording and cataloguing the folk music of rural communities – their shared passion for song is what brings them into each other’s orbit, and the onset of the First World War is what cruelly divides them for the first time. While David goes off to fight, Lionel returns to his family’s farm in Kentucky, where the work is hard and honest. By the time they meet again, they’re both a little worse for wear. A sojourn to rural Maine to continue David’s folk recording project provides both with a new sense of purpose, and rekindles their tentative romance, but like all great ballads, there’s tragedy on the horizon.

    Oliver Hermanus’ sixth feature takes him to North America for the first time, casting two bona fide heartthrobs: Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. When The History of Sound was announced in 2021 it set the internet ablaze, with many excited about the prospect of a tender gay romance starring two of the hottest young actors in the industry – but the resulting film is perhaps more restrained and delicate, sparing in its sexual content, for better or worse. In fact, there’s something even a little distant about the film, in which Lionel and David’s romance amounts to a few months across several years, and much of the focus is on its aftermath. The film is more concerned with how this pivotal moment in Lionel’s life changed everything about the person he would become.

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    Josh O’Connor, seemingly incapable of delivering a bad performance, is wonderful and tragic as David, charismatic and glib and fantastically handsome. Who wouldn’t fall in love with him, or the way his tired smile never seems to reach his eyes? It’s a pity there isn’t more of him, and Mescal opposite is perhaps a little lost as Lionel, despite his best efforts to deliver a serviceable American accent and the charming chemistry between them. There’s just something a little too interior about his performance – it’s difficult to buy that his relationship with David really is as significant as the film wants us to believe it is. It’s also a little unfortunate for Mescal that he’s outperformed by Chris Cooper as an older version of Lionel; he delivers a searing emotional monologue in the film’s final act which provides some much-needed resonance. But to Mescal’s credit, his singing sequences are quite beautiful, as are O’Connor’s, and the folk soundtrack evokes Inside Llewyn Davis in its soulfulness.

    The film feels weighed down by some unnecessary sequences that don’t help to drive the story forward, occasionally forgetting that the crux of the film should be Lionel and David’s relationship and its long shadow; a sharper cut might prevent the film from sagging once the lovers part ways. While comparisons with Brokeback Mountain are inevitable among those with a limited understanding of queer cinema, The History of Sound has far more in common with Merchant Ivory – particularly The Remains of the Day and Maurice – in its pervasive melancholy and sense of profound regret at past inertia. It’s not repression that powers The History of Sound, but the tragedy of understanding something far too late to chase it. Its buttoned-up nature and chasteness might frustrate those hoping for a more salacious story, but Hermanus and writer Ben Shatuck (adapting from his own short story of the same name) have produced a unique and moving romance for those willing to listen.

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  • Romería – first-look review | Little White Lies



    In her Golden Bear-winning Alcarrás, Carla Simón meets a family standing on the brink of a monumental life change, chronicling the minutia of their lives as it begins to morph into something foreign. In Romería, this change lies in the past, where it remained flimsily buried until the curious hands of young Marina (Llúcia Garcia) came to pluck it back to the surface.

    The girl, raised by her mother’s family after becoming orphaned at a young age, just turned 18, and needs to rectify her birth certificate to include her biological father so she can qualify for a scholarship. This bureaucratic chore sees her travel alone from bustling Barcelona towards Vigo, a small city nested in the northwestern coast, where she is suddenly not only no longer alone but surrounded by dozens of family members she either has not met or has very little recollection of.

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    Romería stands for pilgrimage in Spanish, and the film is as much of a literal pilgrimage in Marina’s long overdue homecoming as it is for Simon herself. The semiautobiographical drama is set in 2004, and sees Marina try to make sense of this new expansive world suddenly engulfing her through the low-quality lens of a digital camera. The director zooms into crooked wooden alabasters and delicately swinging wind chimes, grasping at texture and sound with the voracity of those who understand the stakes of faded memories.

    Like in her two previous features, Simon is most interested in capturing the intricate fabric of familial relationships molded by the intimacy of time and suddenly reworked by life’s tricky, unpredictable hands. Similarly to six-year-old Frida in Summer of 1993, Marina has to make sense of the invisible strings connecting the new people that come flooding into her life as well as thread the foreign environment that has shaped them into being. Unlike Frida, however, Marina is on the cusp of womanhood and therefore privy to thornier, more elusive human complexities, and this is where Romería finds its anchoring emotional core.

    That is because both of Marina’s parents have died young, and not of complications of hepatitis like her father’s death certificate claims. The two, who suffered from heroine addiction, contracted AIDS at the height of the epidemic. Much of Romería is told through passages of Marina’s mother’s diaries from 1983, the pages at times made map, at others maze. As the words echo in the teen’s head, lingering in the air of the film through a poignant voice over, a reality long-buried begins to become clearer and clearer.

    The Spanish director broaches the still-present taboo of the virus in a crescendo. When some of Marina’s many cousins sneakily roll some joints in the labyrinthine underworld of the family boat, they make sure to ease away each other’s trepidations by remarking that a little bit of weed won’t turn them into their parents. Then the uncles and aunties ruminate over lost friends and family, ressusciating the dead through the power of collective recollection. The young fell like flies back in the 80s, they say, it was either “accidents, overdose, or AIDS.”

    But, despite a taste of confrontation when the film leaves the realm of the harbor and finally enters the family home and a brief, somewhat tonally misguided flashback, Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

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