Can a pedophile priest redeem himself?

If he has to choose, Fernando Franco will always choose the most arduous path. His filmography speaks of a filmmaker who doesn't like to make things easy for himself, and who imposes a double challenge on himself: to frontally address uncomfortable issues – the unstable nature of a woman with borderline personality disorder in La herida, the agony of a terminally ill patient in Morir, the sexuality of a person with cerebral palsy in La consagración de la primavera– without falling into the morbid sensationalism that these offer. This purpose makes more sense than ever in La luz, which features the most unassailable protagonist of all those the director has portrayed: a priest who becomes aware of the gravity of the abuses he inflicted on minors three decades ago.

Alberto San Juan has the complicated task of making this character digestible, and although he is an actor capable of finding cracks of vulnerability and empathy in the most unexpected profiles, on this occasion he abuses an expression of astonishment. Nor does a dramatic writing help him, which becomes discursive and didactic as the protagonist progresses on his path of redemption, pointing out the endemic perversions of the Church. It is very possible that La luz was a film condemned to stumble over the weeds in the moral garden it ventures into, but perhaps this is one of those cases where it is more worthwhile to value the dangers the work avoids than to highlight the points where it does not stand firm.