Tótem (2024 | Mexico | 95 minutes | Lila Avilés)
Sol (Naíma Sentíes), a young girl of 7, is quiet and polite as she arrives at her grandfather’s home with her mother who’s dropping her off in anticipation of her father, Tonatiuh’s (Mateo Garcia), birthday party that night. Unsure of herself and her place in the house she floats from one family member to the next, aunts, uncles and cousins, treated sweetly but aloof as they prep themselves for the night’s festivities. An air of anxiety and impending loss threatens to suffocate all those in the house. Despite cautious whispering among the adults, the children, especially Sol, aren’t fooled by their choked attempts at being cheerful at full volume. Eventually Sol finds a corner to herself and quietly sits with what we can only assume are thoughts of her father who is resting in the next room. In snippets scattered throughout the film we discover he’s in the final stages of cancer and refuses chemotherapy, just wanting to live out his life in as much peace and dignity as possible. We see fragmented scenes of his physical therapy and ongoing daily experience in pain and exhaustion. Sol really just wants to see her father and spend time with him, but with his physical limitations he just can’t have her in the room most of the day.
She is finally given access and spends time just sitting next to him demurely and talking about sweet things from her day and how she misses him. Her mom also appears and comes to spend time with them until he’s able to come out for the party. By this point we only imagine how much suffering he’s dealing with to simply move around, but the desire to spend time with his loved ones is too important, so he pushes through knowing this may be the last gathering he’ll have. We’re offered a private, close-up view of this family and their relationships not only from Tonatiuh’s view but more importantly from this fragile-yet-enduring girl that may not know what she’s in for but feels it in her bones that her world and who she is will be drastically different very soon.
Heartbreaking in its honesty and vivid reality of what it’s like in the final stages of losing someone inextricably linked to everything in your world Tótem should have been a difficult, if not painful, watch. Somehow you feel a protective instinct for Sol and just want her to see her dad to give him a hug and feel his warmth; in turn the expected anxiety as a viewer is oddly tempered by this young girl’s subdued and thoughtful nature. While you may not be excited by a film like this. Especially so if, like many of us, you’ve experienced more loss in the last few years than we hope to ever see again; but it’s almost a strange kind of comfort to be there with this family while they work through their varying states of loss for such a cherished person.
Tótem arrives in Seattle-area theaters on 3/22