Love is the monster

Eerily reminiscent of our dark contemporary times, this bold tropical dystopian story features Silver Bear winner Paulina García (Gloria, TIFF ’13) as a grandmother who’s aware that she may not live much longer and trying to spend as much time as possible with her beloved six-year-old granddaughter. A series of unexpected events, however, leads her daughter to cut off all contact. After painstakingly earning back her trust, tragedy strikes again: while under the grandmother's care, the child is kidnapped for ransom, throwing everyone into a spiral of desperation.

Marking a striking departure from the warm and gentle humour of his previous Festival selections, All About the Feathers (TIFF ’13) and Helmet Heads (TIFF ’18), director Neto Villalobos Brenes creates a tense, deeply unsettling vision of a society fractured by fear and inequality, an atemporal world of have and have-nots where nannies are armed to the teeth to protect the children of the wealthy from unspecified threats lurking beyond their walls.

Mixing elements of genre storytelling, the narrative centers Latin America's enormous inequality to foreboding effect, focusing on an older woman who refuses to comply while being part of an unsustainable social order built on fear, privilege, and exclusion. Gradually losing any control of her circumstances while clinging to love to retain some hope, the grandmother enters muddy moral waters to answer the eternal question: how far are you willing to go to protect the ones you love?

DIANA CADAVID

Content advisory: mature themes, violence