Violence in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s cinema often begins at the moment when a relationship can no longer maintain the appearance of normality; when the distance between people becomes visible within the frame, and what remains unspoken becomes more important than dialogue. From Stockholm and Mother to The Realm, May God Save Us, and The Beasts, Sorogoyen has repeatedly placed his characters in situations where the boundary between ordinary life and collapse gradually disappears. His collaboration with screenwriter Isabel Peña is grounded in the same subtlety: they do not announce a crisis to the audience, but construct it through the characters’ behavior, their pauses, their silences, and the gradual transformation of their relationships.
The Beloved is the product of this collaboration, but this time Sorogoyen’s camera turns away from politics, society, and external violence and moves inward, toward a family relationship: that of a father who has spent years being present in cinema while remaining absent from his daughter’s life. Esteban Martínez, played by Javier Bardem, is a celebrated filmmaker—a man who knows how to direct actors, construct mise-en-scène, and control a set, but who, when he comes face-to-face with his daughter Emilia, played by Victoria Luengo, after thirteen years, encounters a situation that no directorial instruction can contain. This contradiction is the point of departure for The Beloved: a man who knows the language of cinema better than the language of intimacy.
Esteban’s return to Emilia’s life comes in the form of a cinematic proposition. He is preparing to make a film about Western Sahara and Spain’s colonial past, and he casts his daughter in one of the leading roles. On the narrative level, choosing Emilia appears to be a professional decision; but the film soon makes clear that Esteban is actually trying to reconstruct, through cinema, something he was unable to achieve in life. Rather than approaching his daughter directly, he offers her a role. Instead of talking about the past, he creates a scene for her to perform. This choice immediately establishes cinema’s place within the film. For Esteban, cinema is not merely a profession; it is his language of communication. He is a man who feels secure behind the camera because there he can control the distance between people, the position of the camera, the intensity of the light, the mise-en-scène, and even the actors’ reactions. But his relationship with Emilia begins precisely where these elements can no longer be controlled.
The first meeting between father and daughter returns to cinema before it returns to the past. Esteban asks Emilia whether she still goes to the movies and recalls one of the few happy memories he has of her childhood: an occasion when they went to the cinema together. But this memory quickly becomes a split between two different memories. For Esteban, that night is a pleasant image from the past; for Emilia, it is the memory of an intoxicated and violent father who turned the evening into an experience of humiliation. A single event has produced two different mise-en-scènes in the memories of two people. Esteban does not even accept her account, attempting to treat what his daughter remembers as a narrative constructed by someone else, while Emilia stands by a memory rooted in her lived experience. The significance of this scene lies not simply in the conflict between two versions of one night. From this point onward, Sorogoyen raises a question that runs throughout the film: who has the right to narrate the past? Esteban, who has spent his entire life constructing images, is accustomed to reconstructing the past; but this time, the image his daughter carries of that past does not coincide with his own. Cinema, which once placed the two of them together within the same frame, now reveals that even the memory of a shared frame does not necessarily remain shared. The distance between father and daughter has taken shape in their memories before it becomes visible in the film’s mise-en-scène.
At this point, Sorogoyen draws on one of the most important elements of his cinema: turning space into a component of the drama. The locations, houses, rooms, and even the dinner table are not merely places where events occur; they register the relationships between the people who inhabit them. The characters may sometimes occupy the same frame, but eyelines, bodily distance, and the direction of their movements continue to preserve their separation. Mise-en-scène speaks about the relationship before dialogue does.
The film’s central layer emerges when the camera enters the film Esteban is making. The Beloved uses a film-within-the-film structure, but its function extends far beyond nested storytelling. The film gradually becomes a meta-cinematic work—a film not only about filmmaking, but about the relationship between filmmaking and life. Esteban wants to reconstruct history, while at the same time his own personal past is being reconstructed. He turns on the camera to create an imaginary world, while his own real world enters the frame through that very same camera.
Esteban’s historical film is about violence and colonialism. At first glance, this may appear to be simply the subject of his project, but Sorogoyen places it alongside the protagonist’s personal history. A man who, as a director, wants to represent historical violence is himself the bearer of a violent past. The film within the film thus becomes a mirror in which the more Esteban looks, the more he is forced to see himself. This is where the relationship between director and actor becomes entangled with the relationship between father and daughter. Emilia stands before her father’s camera, but she cannot be expected simply to perform whatever the director wants. Every instruction Esteban gives for a better performance can, on another level, reproduce the same power relations that shaped their relationship in the past. He wants to direct his daughter, but Emilia is no longer willing to be directed. The film set therefore becomes a site of confrontation.
One of The Beloved’s greatest strengths lies precisely in these moments when Sorogoyen blurs the boundary between the set and what lies beyond it. At first, the camera records a professional situation: actors, crew members, the director’s instructions, and repeated takes. But gradually, we begin to feel that something from beyond the frame has entered it. A pause lasts too long; a reaction moves beyond the boundaries of performance; the director’s voice is no longer merely the voice of the director. Life has entered the scene.
In the lunch-and-fish-soup sequence, this process reaches its climax. The dining table, which could have been the setting for either a family scene or a cinematic one, becomes an arena of conflict. The repeated takes and attempts to restore order to the scene are, in fact, Esteban’s attempts to regain control over a relationship that is no longer under his command. Each time he tries to reset the scene, the disorder within the relationship becomes more visible. Here, “cut” acquires a meaning beyond a technical instruction. Esteban can stop the film, but he cannot stop emotions that have escaped his control. He can repeat a take, but he cannot repeat and correct the past. Sorogoyen uses the possibilities of cinematic language to demonstrate cinema’s own limitations. This is one of the film’s most compelling contradictions: a director who can reconstruct reality for the camera is powerless before the reality of life.
Esteban is a complex character precisely because the film does not reduce him to a monstrous father. Javier Bardem moves between authority, narcissism, humor, and vulnerability. He is a man accustomed to his own power on the set, and he sometimes experiences even intimacy according to the same logic of direction. When he feels guilty, he wants to find a way to express it; when he wants to become closer, he designs a way of approaching. The problem is that emotion cannot be designed. In many moments, Bardem plays Esteban with the energy of a dominant man: a large physical presence, a confident voice, and a force that occupies the frame even when he is silent. Opposite him, Luengo delivers a restrained and inward performance. Emilia does not need to shout for her resistance to be visible. Her body, her gaze, and the way she positions herself within the frame often speak more loudly than her dialogue. The contrast between the two performances also shapes the film’s visual logic: the father wants to control the frame; the daughter tries to step outside his frame.
From this perspective, Emilia is not merely the subject of Esteban’s film; she gradually becomes the bearer of the gaze. The farther she moves away from the role of the filmmaker’s daughter, the farther the film itself moves away from Esteban’s perspective. This shift in point of view is crucial, because The Beloved ultimately does not want to tell the story of a father’s return; it wants to register the daughter’s experience of that return. This is where the film departs from the conventional family drama. Sorogoyen has no interest in pushing the relationship toward an easy reconciliation. No cinematic achievement can compensate for thirteen years of absence, and no apology can erase Emilia’s experience. Even when the film gives Esteban an opportunity to express remorse, it maintains a distance between his confession and his daughter’s acceptance of it.
The title The Beloved also acquires a double resonance in this context. Esteban is a man who is beloved and celebrated in the world of cinema, but public adoration offers no guarantee of being loved in private life. He can be admired, win an Academy Award, and command the loyalty of actors and crew members, but he cannot demand his daughter’s affection. Perhaps for this reason, the film is ultimately less about fame than about the cost of fame—the cost paid by a man who has devoted a large part of his life to cinema and now realizes that some of the people in his life cannot be rearranged like the pieces of an edited film.
From this perspective, the resemblance between The Beloved and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is particularly striking. In both films, a successful filmmaker and absent father attempts to reconnect with his daughter through a cinematic project, and in both, cinema becomes a medium through which the past can be revisited. But the difference lies in the tone and perspective of the two filmmakers. Trier approaches cinema more as a possibility for re-reading memory and finding a way back to the family; Sorogoyen is more skeptical—and perhaps more exacting—about that possibility. In The Beloved, the camera is both a means of getting closer and an instrument of control. If Sentimental Value asks whether art can provide a path home, The Beloved poses a more difficult question: can someone who has experienced life as a scene finally confront something that has no mise-en-scène, no repetition, and no second take? Sorogoyen searches for the answer within cinema itself. The camera allows Esteban to see the past again, but it cannot change it. It can record the distance between father and daughter, but it cannot erase that distance.
The Beloved is the film of a man who has spent his entire life constructing images and now finds himself confronted with an image he cannot direct: the image of himself in his daughter’s eyes. And perhaps this is Esteban’s bitterest discovery: cinema can reconstruct life, but it cannot take the place of life.
© 2026. Phoenix Review