‘The Beloved’ Review: Javier Bardem Is a Hotheaded Director in Spanish Daughter-Daddy Drama in Search of a Better Script

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's industry drama comes very soon after "Sentimental Value," bringing many of the same themes to the story of an oppressive filmmaker who casts his estranged daughter in his comeback movie.

Javier Bardem plays a hotheaded filmmaker, one of those “brilliant assholes” mostly incapable of making great art without wringing it out of tyrannical behavior, in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Spanish industry drama “The Beloved.” The director of a memorable 2019 movie called “Madre,” a warped tale of motherhood in which a woman strikes up an affair with a dead ringer of her long-lost son, now turns his camera (or cameras, as Sorogoyen experiments with many visual formats to bewildering effect here) on fatherhood and its sins. Bardem stars as Esteban Martinez, who is casting the leading female role in his new film “Desierto,” a role he has written for his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo).

Sound familiar? That’s because “Sentimental Value” from last year also dwelt in matters between a director father (Stellan Skarsgård) and a weary daughter (Renate Reinsve) wary to return to his limelight despite a plum role written expressly for her. Both exhaustingly drawn-out and piercingly well-acted despite not much of a script, “The Beloved” opens in close-up on its leads as they sit down for a lunch meeting to discuss “Desierto,” Esteban’s 1930s period piece that will shoot on the island of Fuerteventura for colonial Western Sahara in the 1930s. Esteban is a two-time Oscar winner and Cannes Palme d’Or winner who started in gritty independent moviemaking before achieving notoriety with bigger projects that made him a household name. (In terms of comparisons to another Spanish-speaking filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón might fit the bill, as excerpts of Esteban’s first movie “Siroco” feature an intimate “Y Tu Mamá También”-lite threesome between two men and a woman in a hotel room.)

Now, it seems Esteban is in search of a comeback project, because recording DVD audio commentaries on his legacy titles (which actually look kind of … bad?) isn’t enough to sustain a creative career. Emilia, meanwhile, hasn’t received an appealing film offer in some time, and we’ll find out just how much her self-destructiveness (and whose fault is that?!) will have played a role in that. When she and Esteban meet for lunch, hesitatingly going in for the cheek kiss and then fidgeting over the menu, their nervous chatter makes it feel like these two are exes meeting up for the first time in years. But no. “Does the film crew know you’re my father?” Emilia asks, launching into a diatribe Q&A of dueling memories of the same time; it seems Esteban disappeared from Emilia’s life at a very young age, reconnected with her at nine years old, but was mostly an absent father. “Remember ‘Kill Bill 2’?” she asks. Apparently, he showed up high and drunk to the Tarantino movie when she was 13, part of a pattern of behavior that eventually wrecked Emilia’s life.

That sustained, 20-minute scene that opens “The Beloved” — shot in taut close-up but with an improvisatory feel, as Sorogoyen says many scenarios in the film were invented on the go — sets the tone for a movie that occasionally confuses an observational style for profundity. At 130 minutes, “The Beloved” eventually can’t help but spin its own wheels — and around a film set, once “Desierto” enters into production, that looks like the makings of a really boring late-career misfire. The production-within-the-production lends “The Beloved” a flat, visually dispiriting style that isn’t helped by the fact that we spend most of the movie in the desert, already dusty and arid as it is.

Tensions simmer and then eventually boil between Esteban and Emilia during the troubling making of “Desierto.” There’s eventually a stiff run-in between a drunken Emilia and her father, walking on a promenade with his Scandinavian girlfriend Alice and her two blond-headed, pale-skinned children, that prompts Esteban to query Emilia’s alcoholism. Who is he to judge! Indeed, though, back in a poky motel room off the “Desierto” set, Emilia is drinking beers into oblivion, googling herself to discover articles such as one in El País that’s basically calling her a nepo baby, and others rushing to her defense.

Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña’s screenplay understands the psychology of the child of an alcoholic — the pervasive low self-worth, the constant flinching at mood shifts, the need to use alcohol as a crutch themselves (she did drink an entire bottle of red at that lunch meeting, after all), the refusal to accept anyone else’s help or care. But the trenchant psychological undercurrents get mottled by Sorogoyen and cinematographer Álex de Pablo’s constantly reconfiguring style; for reasons that are unclear other than for the sheer love of experimentation, the movie flips film grains, aspect ratios, from color to black and white, from 65 to 35 to 16 and 8mm, and often in the same scene. Even the rushes of “Desierto” suggest that movie is shot in the same erratic style, too. The relentless format changes muddle emotionally what ought to be “The Beloved’s” late-running centerpiece (and most thrilling, at least on a script level) scene, during which a tacit mutiny forms on Esteban’s set, the cast keep missing their lines and their beats, the crew is pissed, and Esteban throws a tantrum that puts the production’s future in jeopardy.

Esteban is a black hole that sucks out all the air from the space around anyone in his midst; Bardem’s perpetually alpha aura makes for a great match to the material. His performance is terrific and internalized as ever, bringing vulnerability and edge to a stereotype. Luengo, too, is strong as Emilia careens between self-loathing and then moments of righteous rage against the father who abandoned her, even though she’s not ready to blame him for everything exactly; she says at one point, “I am not here to be your daughter.” But if Esteban in “The Beloved” is supposed to be one of those genius assholes, I’m only seeing one of those things, because the art he’s making isn’t very good and certainly not convincingly genius. Maybe that’s the point, but Sorogoyen leaves that question hanging in the balance and with us too detached at this point to care about answering it.

Grade: C+

“The Beloved” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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