Past lives and phantasms cue a sophisticated journey into self for three Costa Rican women seemingly adrift, in one way or another, in Valentina Maurel’s “Forever Your Maternal Animal,” which cuts closer to the bone than many movies of its kind in conveying that sense of discomfiting, existential displacement, especially in a post-truth world.
With a poem written by her mother, after which the film is titled, and a vision her partner had dreamed as reference points, the French-Costa Rican director fashions a work that riffs on her first feature and Locarno hit, 2022’s “I Have Electric Dreams,” a visceral two-hander between father and child (played respectively by Reinaldo Amién and Daniela Marín, both returning for similar parent-daughter dynamic), two souls drifting into a path of self-destruction. The apparent resemblances, even with Maurel’s previous short, Cannes 2019 entry “Lucia in Limbo,” will certainly color but not constrain the reception of her latest effort.
While “I Have Electric Dreams” is explicitly positioned as a coming of age for Marín’s 16-year-old Eva, who itches to leave the world of adolescents behind and finally cross the threshold of adulthood, Maurel’s follow-up gestures towards a more ensemble-driven story. The returning performer’s new heroine, Elsa, is now a grownup, who reunites with her family after pursuing her studies in Europe and discovers her young sister, Amalia (newcomer Mariangel Montero), living in their family home alone and unsupervised. Elsa’s inquisitive presence almost instantly irritates Amalia, as the latter refuses to simply acquiesce to her relentless quizzing.
Their house bears witness to the predicament they find themselves in, given how distressing and untidy its state is. Amalia has a lot on her plate: among other concerns, the twenty-year-old has just dropped out of college, her bank account is blocked, she has taken in a dirty and seemingly lost dog, and she hangs out with men not her age (including one named “Creepy”). She’s also definitely not about to repair their kitchen sink that’s been clogged for some time or repaint their walls obscenely vandalized with “puta,” meaning “whore,” though not specifically addressed to anybody.
Naturally, Elsa frets over the situation, but their parents, preoccupied with their own divorced lives, reckon otherwise. Their mother, Isabel (Marina de Tavira, who also portrayed the matriarch in 2018’s “Roma”), is absorbed in the renewed interest in the collection of erotic poems she wrote when she was Amalia’s age, on top of the facial surgery she just had. Their father, Nahuel (Amién), flits from one romantic affair to another, failing to recognize his shortcomings the way fathers typically forget minor yet significant details, like mistaking his younger daughter’s shoe size or never delivering on his promise to have the sink fixed.
Both Amién and de Tavira invite you to feel their newfound freedom and what it’s like to rediscover themselves and resynchronize with the world on their own terms, stripped of the sort of compromise often expected of couples, though Maurel’s slippery script doesn’t easily offer them a free pass.
On the one hand, the film registers as a portrait of an already dysfunctional family slowly fracturing a little bit further and how it manifests in manifold ways, regardless of whether the issue at hand is acknowledged or not. On the other, Maurel does not pass up the opportunity to invest in her women more perceptively than she perhaps did in her directorial debut, exploring the thematic crevices it left unexplored — how the fragments of the three women’s vastly different lives might spur them closer to each other or otherwise.
Maurel, working with cinematographer Nicolás Andrés, mirrors this fragmented, imprecise search for clarity, and even meaning, by populating the film with handheld vistas of characters on foot or in transit, and scenes in which they’re either stuck in crowded streets or lost in the urban din, a feeling often augmented by an almost intrusive close-up, plus a disquieting score. San José, the Costa Rican capital, in all its throughways and recreation spots, transforms into an emotional terrain through which all the existential torpor and dislocation reverberate.
Much the same could be said of Amalia’s esoteric delusions. In a café, Amalia drops a shocker on Elsa: since high school, she’s been visited by a malevolent Caribbean spirit, the so-called Dorlis, who sexually assaults its victims while they’re asleep at night. She proceeds to list some ways to banish the spirit, like flipping her clothes inside out or sprinkling a salt line across her doorway. What further unsettles her sister, though, is that Amalia somehow considers the spectral assault as a sort of “making love.”
Maurel does not perform Amalia’s contact with the Nosferatu-like monster for the camera, dangling the question of whether the encounter is real, though you get the sense that for the director that’s beside the point. In this respect, and in the way the film depicts the disembodying nature of one’s journey back to self and how the story is drawn to the crushing weight of absence, “Forever Your Maternal Animal” likewise makes for a haunting ghost story.
And while Maurel visually withholds such strange phantom visits, she offers a more sound diagnosis, suggesting that Amalia’s volatile, and at times violent, behavior has likely to do with separation issues. After all, her parents no longer live in the family house and rarely visit, presuming it even crosses their minds; then comes the retirement of her nanny, who’s already showing signs of dementia. Hence the dog. The debuting Montero doesn’t shy from making you fully absorb how thorny or exhaustingly human Amalia could get; at points the character revels in how the heated confrontations — between her and Elsa, between her and their parents — would tip her way.
Some of what makes the film so unassumingly profound is that Maurel draws focus to the mess of the female experience — whether this experience be considered in the context of the domestic, social, or cultural — from a considered distance, without passing any judgment on or feeling sorry for the characters. When Isabel, on a car ride, confides to Elsa that she’s more worried about her than her mercurial sibling, it unnerves the eldest, who has never realized, at least until the film’s end, that perhaps the life she’s imagined for Amalia in a homeland she hasn’t set foot in for years is a sort of projection resulting from her education and renewed upbringing abroad.
“Forever Your Maternal Animal” telegraphs the seismic tension of having to reconcile your ideals for both yourself and others with the new reality you’re orbiting. And it does so in a dramatically self-effacing manner. There is no sharp shock in terms of plot here; if anything, the film hardly relies on it. The dramatic pull lies in the ambiguity of it all. Nor does it tell you how to “read” these women.
Instead, by underlining the complex contours of their lives, Maurel yields an empathetic, sensitively stirring work that flouts the readily legible image of motherhood and womanhood its title alludes to.
Grade: B+
“Forever Your Maternal Animal” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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