El Ser Querido (The Beloved)

Rodrigo Sorogoyen finally arrives in Competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival with El Ser Querido, and he does so with confidence, precision, and absolute command of the medium.

The film rests on the monumental shoulders of Javier Bardem, delivering one of the finest performances of his career as Esteban Martínez, a legendary Oscar-winning filmmaker returning to his native Spain to shoot his latest project: a colonial-era epic unfolding in the Saharan desert. But beneath the scale and prestige lies a far more intimate excavation, his attempt to reconnect with his estranged daughter Emilia, an aspiring actress left orbiting the edges of his shadow after thirteen years of silence.

Sorogoyen understands that the most devastating emotions are rarely spoken aloud, and makes that greatest strength of his picture. Conversations over green beans and sea bass tartare become battlegrounds of restraint, where every glance, pause, and awkward silence says more than dialogue ever could. Few filmmakers working today wield tension with this level of patience and sophistication. The prolonged sequences unfold like carefully tightened screws, volcanos bubbling with ancient magma about to erupt.

When Esteban offers Emilia the lead role in his new film, the gesture lands somewhere between generosity and selfish absolution, an attempt to boost her career while quietly atoning for years of absence. But as one character sharply remarks: “You can’t pretend movies fix everything.”

The premise may initially recall Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a Cannes favourite from last year built around familial fractures and artistic legacy, but Sorogoyen pushes the material into far more volatile territory. El Ser Querido becomes a thrilling dissection of power dynamics on a film set, where the boundaries between father and director dissolve completely. In the scorching landscapes of Fuerteventura, affection and authority constantly clash, as performances, both on and off camera, become impossible to separate from reality.

One extraordinary sequence encapsulates the film’s brilliance. A chaotic scene shoot spirals into comedic disaster as actors repeatedly fail to land a take, sending the audience into hysterics sharing the contagious laughter on set. Then, in an instant, Sorogoyen flips the temperature entirely. Bardem emerges from video village with a glacial stare, and the crew, as well as the audience, freezes. The laughter evaporates, replaced by fear, and what moments earlier felt hilarious suddenly becomes deeply unsettling. Few directors can pivot from comedy to psychological terror with such frightening fluidity.

Formally, Sorogoyen is just as adventurous. He toys with aspect ratios and textures, moving between 65mm grandeur, grainy Super 8 intimacy, stark black-and-white, and raw video formats. Yet the stylistic shifts never feel ornamental; each visual language sharpens perspective and deepens the emotional architecture of the story.

So far, this is the best film of Cannes 79, and a fierce, emotionally layered triumph.