In some respects, “La Libertad Doble” is a classic sequel that restages the first installment’s greatest hits before introducing new characters and raising the stakes — but in this case, “greatest hits,” “new characters,” and “raising the stakes” are all a little different.
Premiering when writer/director Lisandro Alonso was all of 26, 2001’s “La Libertad” was the most ascetic gauntlet thrown down during the turn-of-the-millennium slow cinema boom. The film eliminated even a gesture toward a plot while showing solitary nonprofessional and real-life ranch-hand Misael Saavedra chopping and hauling logs in the Argentinian hinterlands (in actuality, Alonso’s family’s ranch). It was a strong introduction to arguably most severe filmmaker of his generation, without the violent punctuations and levitations of Bruno Dumont or the supernatural and sexual eruptions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, two contemporaries whose slightly-less-withholding works are also regularly staged in deeply personal homeplace landscapes.
As with David Lynch delivering on Laura Palmer’s promise to “see you again in 25 years” with “Twin Peaks: The Return,” Alonso has likewise returned 25 years later with an unexpected and demanding followup. Arriving at a moment when the pope has called for films to be more attentive to D.W. Griffith’s oft-cited “beauty of the moving wind in the trees,” this textbook piece of slow cinema is precisely on schedule.
“La Libertad Doble” spends the first third of its 100 minutes running through a compacted version of the 73-minute original. The shots are so close to their original iterations as to invite a game of “spot-the-difference” in which the sole visible one is often the main character’s obviously aged body. The opening is otherwise precisely the same, down to the minimal camera movements: Misael eating meat alone, cutting up pieces with an enormous knife while barely lit by the flames in front of him, and, sporadically, almost-silent lightning bursts in the distant background. It’s a spectacular image of overtly theatrical spectacularity conjured from natural resources, after which both films downshift into a lower-key daylight register.
Misael’s daily routine from the first film hasn’t changed much: there are extended studies of branches being lopped off, bark meticulously peeled away with an ax and whole trees crashing down. Where the first film occasionally allows itself the odd dose of the visually spectacular, as when a tree falls just inches from the camera, Alonso’s attentiveness to painterly details like small piles of dust from a tree getting the chainsaw treatment has only grown more rigorous. The emphasis this time is even more on meticulous sound — the unexpectedly light thunk of a felled log hitting the ground, carefully mixed breeze and birds.
There are some new additions to these opening sections, notably a new companion. Meet Sordo, a large, endearing white dog and strong early Palme Dog contender. In one scene, Misael disappears entirely from the forest as the canine roams around in the background while a calf grazes up front. Depending on your POV, this is either an image of a prelapsarian Eden or a bleaker version of a post-Anthropocene planet left to the animals. That ambiguity is crucial, as the world’s worsening turns out to be the sequel’s subject.
Because “La Libertad Doble” is, like its predecessor, relentless in whittling down the sources from which pleasure can be generated, it’s doubly shocking when the narrative kicks in: first, because of the surprise of a plot intruding at all, then by what that entails. Misael is informed that his long-institutionalized sister Catalina (Catalina Saavedra) was seen wandering the streets in town, possibly drunk. Given that the first film showed a man alone in the world, news of family ties are startling.
Misael’s subsequent hospital visit brings Alonso back to the Lynchian mode he explored in 2023’s “Eureka,” whose first half often took place in shockingly garbage-strewn interiors radiating further ambient unease from the paint on the walls. This collapse of order and reason is further accentuated by a man, naked save his underwear, sleeping sweaty and slumped over in a chair.
This abrupt stylistic shift is in service of an overtly political argument. Misael has been summoned because the hospital is being shut down and all patients discharged as the result of budget cuts. Here, Alonso is dramatizing with very direct clarity his previously stated conviction that life in Argentina has become harder in the 25 years since his first film. Disrupting the possibility of cheerful solitude is both a stylistic and social shift, disturbing the film’s non-narrative serenity while depicting how dismantling the safety net displaces basic functions onto those least able to bear them.
The rest of the film consists of the brother and sister’s return to the ranch, now suffused with dread at Misael’s inability to properly care for his sibling. It’s worth noting that, despite the coincidence of a shared last name, Catalina is not actually related to Miguel, but a well-known Chilean actress perhaps best known internationally for her title part in 2009’s “The Maid.” Her performance is uncanny, though the conception and function of the character — a mentally ill innocent who mostly sets other performers and society into relief — is thankless and the film’s weakest link.
The original film’s title provoked much debate: was it sincerely descriptive of its protagonist’s existence or an ironic label for backbreaking, isolating labor? “La Libertad Doble” extends the implications of the title to its filmmaker, freshly freed from both industrial production methods and standard aesthetic benchmarks. Following the multi-year delays involved in shooting “Eureka” (almost) entirely digitally, Alonso has re-embraced a working method of once again shooting on 35mm with a ten-person crew (including the original’s DP Cobi Migliora, with whom Alonso hasn’t worked since 2004’s “Los muertos”).
The film concludes with a post-credits surprise that allows Alonso to (sort of) restore the original ending of “La libertad” he was forced to cut to get that film into Cannes. The world may be worsening, but at least Alonso’s finally getting his artistic way, returning to the festival 25 years later on his own terms. His persistence is heartening.
Grade: A-
“La Libertad Doble” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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