A ferocious Javier Bardem performance headlines Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s tense and unsettling family filmmaking drama, about the fraught relationship between a controversial filmmaker and his estranged actress daughter.
Manolo%20Pavo%CC%81n-2000-2000-1125-1125-crop-fill.jpg?k=c64aa7c77f)
The Beloved is a fabulous film about filmmaking, and an astute and hard-hitting one about family dynamics.
The Beloved 2026
El ser querido
In the bravura opening sequence of The Beloved, filmmaker Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem) sits down with his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo), hoping to convince her to appear in his latest film, a Sahara-set colonial desert epic. The sequence lays bare the tensions that the rest of the film will unspool—Esteban has a reputation for being a hothead with an emotionally and physically violent past; Emilia, meanwhile, is both beguiled by and cautious of the advances of a man she barely knows. Sorogoyen’s emotionally blistering drama examines the rippling consequences that stem from enabling the imperious ‘genius artist’, a film that tellingly echoes the Me Too movement without ever drawing a clear line in that direction.
In Sorogoyen’s most arresting stylistic gambit, the film plays out across a range of formats and lenses, from traditional celluloid to black and white digital photography to DV-Cam, oscillating at random to maintain a sense of displacement and anxiety. A kind of bitter, caustic inverse of last year’s Sentimental Value, Sorogoyen does away with any sense of gentleness, as snarling Bardem (in his finest and most terrifying performance since No Country for Old Men) delivers an electric shock to the ‘film–about-filmmaking’ archetype.
– Tom Augustine