Another Unhappy Family, Excellently Portrayed

Forever Your Maternal Animal (Valentina Maurel, 2026) once again proves Tolstoy’s adage “that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way” with a powerful tale of maternal transferance and feminine reclamation that thrives in its very particular tale of familial dysfunction. While on the surface, it feels like yet another variation on the classic independent-family-member-returns-to-their-hometown-only-to-be-dragged-into-everyone-else’s-bullshit genre, sophomore director Maurel finds creative ways to reflect each family member back on to each other, in a touching reverie on the ties that bind us, even when everything seems to be falling apart.

Elsa (Daniela Marín Navarro) is our hero, returning to Costa Rica from Brussels, ostensibly to sort out some bureaucratic issues, yet we sense there is something deeper going on behind the surface, especially her relationship with the unseen Sven back in Belgium. But when she returns to the family house, occupied only by her younger sister Amalia (Mariangel Villegas), she finds that the locks have been changed. Her sister is changing too: having dropped out of university, she barely cleans the house, also occupied by a mutt and, sometimes, an odd gang of useless layabouts.

I was worried around this point that Maternal Animal was content to be a simple kitchen sink drama: people with problems related to socio-economic conditions that lead to bad things happening. But once Elsa visits her estranged mother, Isabel (Marina de Tavira), a writer who retired early to raise her two kids, the film really steps into gear, with a spicy dialogue, caught in frantic handheld with quick cuts, that truly asks us to consider Isabel’s perspective and her reason not to be too involved in Amalia’s life. It’s knotty and complicated and real. It’s a proper drama.  

Maruel’s careful screenplay helps us to see this family, also including the absent and forgetful father Nahuel (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez), as real, rounded people, avoiding archetypes of neglect and chaos, and capturing the nuances of everyday relationships. This makes it all the more affecting when Amalia finally reveals that she’s not merely lazy and unmotivated, but might actually be suffering from psychotic delusions. In this moment, Elsa’s face and eyes — excellently interpreted by Navarro — seem to sink backwards, unable to comprehend the terror of losing her sister to unspecified mental troubles.

Yet Maternal Animal does what any good movie about mental illness should do: reflect it back upon the so-called “sane” people, to ask what makes anyone existing in the modern world truly psychologically stable. Elsa cares about her sister, but one gets the sense that she isn’t spending much time thinking through her own issues, especially her true feelings about Sven and a growing sexual unfulfillment, wasted on affairs with random, unsatisfying men. This sense of lost opportunity, personal, mental, sexual, is then best embodied by the middle-aged Isabel herself, who is forced to revisit her youth when a book of her erotic poetry, written when she was in her 20s, is republished. Only at the end of the film do we hear her fresh work, and a fresh vision for her two daughters, who, one can hope, find a way to move forward in their lives, with, or without, each other.