The Beloved (El ser querido) | 2026 Cannes Film Festival Review

What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Sorogoyen Visualizes Dysfunction & Creative Catharsis

Although it’s a familiar trope, an absent father utilizing a complex ruse to reunite with a child abandoned from a previous relationship, Rodrigo Sorogoyen distills potential extremes into robust parameters depending heavily on shifting visual formats to display fluctuating emotional conflicts roiling in the depths. Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo (Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, 2024) spar as a father and daughter tossed together, arguably on a misguided whim bordering on hubris from the estranged parent, as they commence working on a film, neither quite realizing how tension will be alleviated or potential expiation received. Despite the potential grueling running time for such a specific and intimate narrative thrust, Sorogoyen presents something nothing short of fascinating in how creation allows for its own powerful form of catharsis.

Esteban Martinez (Bardem) is a world renowned, Academy Award winning director set to commence a new project in Spain, titled Desert, the first film he’s directed in his fatherland in quite some time. Controversially, in both a professional and personal sense, he has cast his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) in the lead role, a fledgling actress heretofore unknown to the world, and, more importantly, her father. Their first meeting establishes some deep-seated issues which should likely be dealt with anywhere other than a film set. But filming commences, with Esteban not quite anticipating his inability to retain his composure when confronted with realities he consistently continues to ignore.

Martinez is representative of countless ‘auteurs’ whose personal foibles become part of their legendary persona, where dysfunction and drama heightens the awe despite critical awareness in the zeitgeist. Ingmar Bergman’s reputation comes to mind as one prime example, who sired many children with his leading ladies but would never take any real responsibility for rearing. As Esteban, Bardem is clearly trying to manufacture a rehabilitation of his own curious design by offering his eldest daughter the opportunity of a lifetime by casting her as the lead in his new film. Notably, the main themes within the movie he’s making also, in a nebulous way, relates to this relationship, dealing as it does with an abandoned people in the Sahara desert once occupied by Spain. In a cruel sense, the casting of Emilia is also something of an afterthought, as we learn the filming of Desert is also a return to his native country, a way of hitting two birds with one stone as he returns to his roots. Concurrently, Esteban is recording a commentary track for the Blu-ray release of his first film, Sirocco, where he met Emilia’s mother, the actual hot wind blowing him back to deal with his past sins.

Sorogoyen basically creates a complex dance between father and daughter, each circling the obvious build to a confrontation with the pain pulsating beneath the surface. Luengo often seems like a wary creature, sometimes desiring to strike for the jugular, but more often than not anesthetizing herself with alcohol. An uncomfortable moment wherein she’s forced to greet Esteban’s new family, a willowy blonde woman and the tow-headed youngsters who are the half-siblings she’s never met, feels as if Emilia is something like the surviving child of Medea, welcoming the members of the fair-haired, sun-bleached tribe Jason abandoned his first wife and children for.

While The Beloved is also a film about filmmaking, the actual details of Desert aren’t as important, taking a backseat to the mixing of digital film used to evoke emotional shifts, switching freely between 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm. The color of everyday pleasantry switches to a stark black and white, as if characters are literally backed into a strict binary of fight or flight. Behind-the-scene rumblings with Esteban’s French producer Marina Fois (star of Sorogoyen’s excellent The Beasts, 2022), with whom he also shares a history of blurred boundaries, heighten the unstated tension of Emilia perhaps not being quite right for the role in a dual sense, phoning in her performance as both an actor and a rejected daughter.

The rushes we catch glimpses of, where a stark, white fortress is erected in the hot sand like the carcass of some unnamable beast, conjures a sense of an alienating prison akin to The Desert of the Tartars (1976), the Valerio Zurlini classic adapted from Dino Buzzati’s novel. The sense of reconciliation, or its absence, is the palpable heartbeat in The Beloved, its essence merely a fleeting ghost caught on celluloid, forever open to interpretation and perspective of the players and its witnesses.

Reviewed on May 16th at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (79th edition) – Competition. 135 Mins

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆