Tótem Piercingly Asks If Love is Enough

I counted various living entities throughout Mexican Competition entry Tótem (Lila Avilés, 2023): 

• Three dogs 
• A parrot 
• A pigeon 
• A slug 
• A kitten 
• A goldfish
• A scorpion 
• And a bonsai tree 

The living world is all around us. All these things are constant reminders of mortality.

Sol (Naíma Sentíes) certainly has death on her mind. Her father Tona (Mateo García Elizondo) is dying of cancer. Coming into contact with the idea of death for the first time, she asks her phone when the world will end. Suitably fitting her name, it’s when the sun gets absorbed by a red giant. 

This is haunting stuff, but her childish existentialism is balanced out by the adults, who manage to keep the anxiety away by bogging themselves down in more banal things. They are hosting a birthday party for Tona. It’s not so much a celebration as a protracted goodbye.

The result, Avilés’ second feature after The Chambermaid (2018),  isn’t just a step-up in form. It’s a quantum leap. This is a second coming on the international film stage that shows that she’s looking to stick around.

With hues of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), Tótem stays almost entirely in one location: a ramshackle house with constant comings and goings, arguments and smashed things, crazy children scampering, bickering, playing and running around, adults smoking and drinking; a combination of chaos and beauty — a film with a documentary-feeling that is both a long, warm embrace, and a dark, tragic farewell. 

Avilés doesn’t so much shoot her characters as lovingly caress them with the camera, using a tight, bouncy frame to capture both the hustle and bustle of the house, and the multifarious emotions of its protagonists. One scene in particular captures Avilés knack for executing difficult scenes perfectly: the adults discussing the next steps of Tona’s treatment with the kids playing in the background. On the surface it sounds simple, but the technical detail in the shot imbues it with complexity and meaning.

Creating this type of movie can be very difficult because if you make the emotions too obvious, then you can quickly tide over into mawkishness. But there’s a hard, raw edge to proceedings that is undeniably lump-in-the-throat inducing. There is no artificial conflict or fake enemies. The only enemy is death itself. Layering different ideas and emotions right up until the final shot, Tótem piercingly questions if love is truly enough. The answer, you can imagine, is complicated.