A ghost story with Lluís Homar, Núria Prims and a dazzling Zoe Stein

In this evocative debut feature, Lucía Aleñar Iglesias expands the universe created in her award-winning short film of the same name. The Madrid-born filmmaker starts from a physical space (a house in Mallorca, by the sea) to reveal, little by little, the interiority of a family plunged into grief: a granddaughter (Zoe Stein, as unsettling as she is moving), a grandfather (Lluís Homar, in an unusually restrained performance), a mother, and the ghostly presence of the grandmother, who has just passed away. From Cría cuervos to Verónica, stories of (and with) ghosts have constituted ideal frameworks for coming-of-age and transition-to-adulthood narratives, but Aleñar Iglesias avoids the clichés of the subgenre with an aesthetic, formalist, and rigorous proposal that emulates a worn-out postcard and features a prickly central character, Cata (Stein), who defies all definition.

It is a fabulous idea, on the part of the director and screenwriter, to turn grief into a strategy of identity substitution and masking (or perhaps should we say spiritual possession?) that ends up transforming the dynamics of a family marked, like all of them, by disagreements and lack of communication. It is possible that the centripetal force summoned by Stein's dazzling face slightly blurs the rest of the characters, especially the mother (Núria Prims), but there is no doubt that we are facing a first feature of unusual strength and confidence.