‘Totem’
Manager: Lila Aviles
Artists: Naíma Sentiés, Montserrat Marañón, Marisol Gasé
Year: 2023
Premiere: 03/1/24
★★★
Totem unfolds as a portrait of a Mexican family pressed into a single, suffocating hour and a half. The action centers on a house that is vast in footprint yet gradually narrows around its inhabitants. The day begins with the quiet tightening of anticipation as a surprise party forms in the shadows, and moves through to the awkward, luminous moment when the gathering actually comes alive. The setting, expansive at first, becomes a claustrophobic stage for private storms and public memories to collide.
A handful of figures carry the emotional weight of the narrative: a young man who can barely traverse room to room, his movements measured and haunted; an elder who communicates through a windpipe, his words shaped by the device that carries them; a middle‑aged woman who believes the house bears malevolent energy and acts to exorcise it; and a healer, a woman who embodies rituals to cleanse the space by expelling smoke and sound. These voices converge and diverge, offering glimpses of vitality and vulnerability that sit side by side on the same stage.
From the perspective of a seven year old girl, the world becomes a mosaic of astonishing clarity and stubborn confusion. She is the daughter of the ailing father, and the grandfather’s breath carries his presence far beyond the living room. The mother departs with her own quiet resolve, leaving behind a thread of tension that threads through the party and into the next morning. As relationships fracture, the narrative probes themes of impatience and the fragile equilibrium of mental health. Snails slip across fabrics and dark paintings seem to breathe, symbols that deepen the sense of an environment inhabited by memory as much as by people.
The story might have drifted into melodrama about a dysfunctional family, yet the film treats each moment with a rare naturalness. The director captures honest, unforced exchanges, pauses that feel earned, and glances that carry volumes. In this approach, the characters glimpse the abyss without surrendering to it. The tension arises not from melodramatic contrivance but from the real, often imperfect, humanity that threads through their interactions. Each scene is a collision of everyday life with sudden emotional weather, a reminder that the ordinary can conceal profound depths.
The film invites viewers to watch what lies between lines and behind the smiles. It does not sensationalize despair but rather offers a lucid, unadorned look at how a family negotiates care, blame, love, and fear when a space meant for celebration turns into a ground for confession. The performances are intimate yet expansive, anchored by a quiet, observant camera that records not only the spoken words but the tremor in a hand, the hesitation before a phrase, the way a room changes when a name is spoken. The result is a living portrait of a household that holds its breath while preparing for release.
The atmosphere is both tender and piercing, a combination that makes the party feel inevitable and necessary. The film moves with a measured pace that allows audiences to settle into each emotional nuance, to notice the smallest gesture, the most fleeting expression. The act of healing, whether it comes through ritual or resilience, unfolds with a soft insistence that gates open only with time and trust. In the end, Totem becomes less about a single event and more about the way a family carries its history through the corridors of a house that has witnessed generations of joys and sorrows.
In sum, Totem is a sensitive study of kinship under pressure. It surveys how memory, illness, and love reshape a familiar space into a living archive. The result is a film that lingers, inviting repeated viewings to catch the subtle revelations woven into the characters’ interactions, the house’s whispered secrets, and the quiet, almost ritual gestures that bind the family together even as they drift apart.