The intimate, highly personal family drama shot in an unobtrusive, semi-documentary way is Spanish auteur Carla Simón’s speciality, and in Romería, her latest film, she stays true to her vocation.
Born in the mid-1980s, Simón was orphaned at an early age and raised by an uncle. In the early 2000’s she set off on a quest to find out more about her father’s family. The story here is pretty similar – Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in Vigo in the early years of the 21st century, to chase down the paperwork she needs to get her into university to study film but also to dig out information about her parents. They fell in love in the 1980s, gave birth to Marina and then weren’t able to raise her, for reasons Marina has a shadowy grasp on, but wants to know more about. Making video diary recordings on her camcorder, Marina gets to know various members of a family she didn’t know much about, in particular her uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), who has a big boat, a gaggle of offspring and a good grasp on family lore.
But the new information she gets from Lois and other family members doesn’t quite mesh. No one is lying to Marina but they don’t seem to be able to agree on where her parents met, or lived, or what they got up to, though drugs are hinted at early on, something Marina possibly already knew. Everyone seems almost insistently agreed that Marina’s parents were very much in love and that Marina is the spitting image of her mother.
Family secrets and family shame are the offer here, with Marina’s bumpy journey towards knowledge stirring up painful memories for her father’s surviving family. In particular a family party at the home of her grandparents, prickly with a sense that there are questions she should not ask, or if she does then she should be prepared to get lies as answers.
Simón’s loose, atmospheric way of building a story is very much in evidence, and it would all possibly be a touch inconsequential without really strong performances to anchor everything. Garcia in particular is magnetic and has something of that “hot but doesn’t know it” French New Wave ingenue quality. We get the sense of a girl becoming a woman, a person coming into self-knowledge.
But the gaggle of actors playing Marina’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces are up there with her, generating a boisterous family dynamic that’s really rings true.
At a certain point Simón goes all magical realism, with Garcia playing her own mother in a segment that’s half flashback, half fantasy, while handsome Mitch Martín, a cousin (but not a blood cousin, which is significant, if you follow my drift), also plays Marina’s husband. Here, Simón gives us a flavour of the Spain that existed in the aftermath of the death of the fascist dictator Franco, when drugs were cool and rebellion was in the air.
At another she gives us travelogue moments at one of those local nighttime Spanish festivals that seems always to be on the verge of dying out but never quite do – a procession, odd costumes, traditional dances.
By the end there is a sense that we are all semi-doomed before we’re even born, by challenges our parents faced but failed to put to the sword. And yet Simón also manages something approaching a happy ending. After Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, Romería makes it three features by Simón based on her own early years. If she follows up with a Star Wars or MCU movie she’ll disappoint a lot of fans.
Romería – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
