The Beloved

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's heartwrenching latest delivers two masterful performances

Rodrigo Sorogoyen is not one for lighthearted films. Even at his most relaxed he still lands heartbreaking blows, as he did with his recent limited series The New Years (2024). It tracks, given that he broke through charting descents into moral corruption inside Spanish institutions with May God Save Us (2016) and The Candidate (2018). Sorogoyen has found a way to make you squirm, to sit uneasily with the suffering and the dark places he puts his characters. He managed it in short form with the Oscar-nominated Madre (2017), built around a single phone call to a mother whose child appears to have been abducted, and again with The Beasts (2022), which followed a true story of murder over land rights in rural northern Spain. For his latest, he has turned to the film industry itself, and more particularly to a father and a daughter.

The Beloved (2026) follows Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem), a world-renowned director who returns to Spain to make his next film after years living in the US. There he reaches out to his estranged adult daughter, Emilia (Victoria Luengo), an actress he hasn't seen or spoken to in thirteen years, and casts her as his lead. The film then revolves around the shoot, where repressed emotion and buried history come bubbling to the surface.

The Beloved has drawn comparisons to Sentimental Value (2025), and on paper the two look similar, but in style, tone, and temperament they could hardly be further apart. Sentimental Value kept its Nordic reserve and a clean distance from each character, letting emotion surface in a steady, cool drip. The Beloved brings a Mediterranean sensibility to its people and its story, letting feeling snap forth once it has reached fever pitch, and playing with form far more daringly. Sorogoyen is in total command of his craft here, taking audacious leaps: switching scenes to black and white, shifting stock from digital to film, jumping between aspect ratios. That, alongside Álex de Pablo's cinematography, which stays suffocatingly close to its subjects, keeps the audience unsettled and hemmed in, never able to relax into what might come next, and therefore planted squarely in the characters' shoes.

Fatherhood may be among the oldest subjects in film and in art generally, and The Beloved draws on plenty of predecessors, from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to East of Eden (1955) and the Spanish classic El Sur (1983). Many of those works land on the same theme of a father’s arrested development, where the longing for connection, recognition, and repair is pursued but never granted. It's a devastating dramatic choice, and one Sentimental Value veered away from in favor of a more Hollywood resolution. It also forces the child to accept that peace has to be found from within. The Beloved follows many of these patterns, but makes its core a tease: Esteban circling his own guilt, seeming on the verge of apologizing, of naming the sins and the weight he carries, before snapping into a dark rage that buries the feeling again.

Sorogoyen uses almost no music, letting scenes unfold raw and forcing viewers into the discomfort and confusion of his characters. With no score to signal what a scene means, the clouded emotional distance between father and daughter becomes far more unsettling. There is exactly one musical cue, in a single moment: Esteban's gaze follows an unsuspecting Emilia across a hotel breakfast buffet while he listens to a sample of the fictional film's soundtrack, able to see her through his art, his true feelings flashing forth before being snuffed out again.

The Beloved is about fatherhood, but by way of that exploration it also interrogates the masculinity Sorogoyen has been circling for years: the man who appears to be in control of his profession, his emotions, himself, and who comes entirely undone as that grip loosens. It comes to a head in Esteban, a middle-aged man whose outbursts are no longer tolerated, and who is both incapable and unwilling to look inward for fear of what he'd find. Only through his art can he communicate and process his guilt, and only there can he connect with his daughter. And in a far more tragic move than anything in Sentimental Value, Esteban proves capable of connecting only with the character his daughter plays on screen, never with the woman of flesh and blood standing beside him.

Sorogoyen has cast the best Spanish actor working today, arguably of all time, opposite one of the most exciting performers of her generation. Bardem is at the height of his powers, so completely in command of the screen that every pore on his face seems to transmit something; you can't help but sigh along with each line reading. His Esteban is clearly an intelligent man, but one in absolute terror of owning his mistakes or his past, the guilt eating at him visible behind his eyes, frequently unable to look Emilia in the face. Facing down a scene partner like that would intimidate any screen veteran, yet Luengo, already well established within the Spanish industry and known to international audiences mainly from small roles in Almodóvar's two most recent films, The Room Next Door (2024) and Bitter Christmas (2026), is an absolute standout. Hers is the perspective the audience latches onto, and so it falls to her to carry the emotional weight of our Virgil-like descent into turmoil. Luengo's Emilia holds together the messy reality of a daughter caught between papering over the pain so she can have a father again, and exorcising the anger and darkness Esteban's actions have wrought across her entire life. It is a tortured, all-consuming performance, and not one you'll shake off quickly.

The Beloved is Sorogoyen's best film to date: daring in its direction, deliciously awkward and poundingly realistic in its dialogue, and anchored by two astonishingly raw performances. The result is a drama that leaves you indented into your cinema seat, stupefied, having delivered a catharsis few films this year will match.

8.8/10