OVERVIEW
After thirteen years of silence, Oscar-winning Spanish director Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem) reaches out to his daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo), a working actress with a stalled career, offering her the lead role in his next film, a 1930s period epic shooting in the Canary Islands. Hesitant at first, she takes the part. As production starts, father and daughter must confront a past they remember differently.
BACKGROUND
The Beloved lands at Cannes a year after Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value premiered in the same competition with the same premise on paper. Sorogoyen’s version, written with longtime partner Isabel Peña, was actually conceived back in 2021, born of a dinner conversation with Victoria Luengo about paternity, long before Trier’s film became Oscar history. It also became Sorogoyen’s graduation to the Cannes main competition, after The Beasts played the Première section in 2022 and went on to win the French César for Best Foreign Film.
THE REVIEW
The timing is unfortunate, as the premise is so simple that it is challenging to watch the film without comparing it to its Nordic older brother, especially for this reviewer, who considers Sentimental Value the best film of 2025. It is not the same dynamic beat for beat. Sorogoyen’s film offers a more emotionally direct take, less about the family across generations and more about the artist, the set, and the film being made on it. Where everything in Sentimental Value eventually connected to inherited pain, and to what the passing of time leaves behind, here the film deals with more frontal themes, like toxic masculinity and the cost of being raised by someone who caused pain but never admitted to it.
It certainly loses in intricacies. The attempts of humour, so great in Trier’s film, are far more muted here. The script is also far more direct, as the hurt experienced by Emilia is declared out loud from the very first scene, and then returned to in obvious fashion. A moment when Esteban gives a lemon ice cream to his far younger child, now with his new partner, is broken by Emilia, who drunkenly interrupts to ask if he knew that lemon was her favorite too. There are great scenes between father and daughter, including the opening twenty minutes, set in a restaurant and shot in one continuous take, which is a masterclass in acting from both sides. Yet even there, the film is very obvious about its intentions, adding complexity to the relationship only in its final moments.
The film comes to life when it focuses on the actual shooting of the picture, peaking in a scene where the actors eating soup drive Esteban out of his mind. It is also interesting to watch Emilia gain confidence across the shoot, or to see the smaller conflicts behind the scenes, like a composer sending in his demo cue too late, Esteban analyzing a scene without audio, or the production having to replace a cinematographer mid-shoot. Those scenes entertain, but they are not particularly deep. It is also worth noting that Sorogoyen does not quite take full advantage of the film’s desert setting. The heat is mentioned once, but the actors rarely sweat.
Throughout the runtime, Sorogoyen makes a few stylistic choices, such as changes in aspect ratio and shifts between color and black-and-white, each with an obvious meaning. They are cheeky, but they do not cause a great impact on the overall film. What truly elevates it are the two main actors. Bardem effortlessly carries his character’s intelligence and calculated choices, while balancing the character’s unlikability with a huge dose of charisma, leaving viewers conflicted. Luengo conveys well Emilia’s loss of hope in the endeavor, making it clear that, even though she was defiant from the outset, she hoped things would have turned out differently. The two are often forced to speak lines that already dictate what they are conveying, and they still make it work. The film concludes with a powerful moment that questions the meaning of its title. It is somewhat predictable in shape, but it lands harder than the rest of the film does.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Because of its unfornate timing, The Beloved arrives with an unavoidable comparison, and it loses that fight on most fronts. It is more direct, more declarative, and less interested in the long shadow of family than Trier’s film. What it has going for it is a great Javier Bardem performance, Victoria Luengo matching him beat for beat, and a handful of entertaining film-set sequences. Its father-daughter dynamic is not revelatory, but the actors give it enough force to make the film confident, well-acted, and occasionally gripping.