Lois Patiño begins his new film Ariel by spatially positioning Shakespeare’s The Tempest within the frame, as the image of an island opens as if a curtain onto the film. Ariel is the director’s second film drawing from The Tempest, following 2022’s short Sycorax, co-directed and co-written by Matías Piñeiro. Piñeiro, who has a story credit on this film but eventually left the project to direct last year’s You Burn Me, has far more experience working with Shakespeare, dating back to his 2011 mid-length feature Rosalinda — also the first of many collaborations with Agustina Muñoz, who stars in both Sycorax and Ariel as a version of herself, credited here as Agus.
In Ariel, Agus is an Argentinian actress traveling to Patiño’s Spain to take over the eponymous role in a traveling production of The Tempest. After checking in with her colleagues and visiting with family, she finds herself traveling by boat to the Azores, an autonomous region in Portugal where she will commence her performing tour. Though no spell brings forth a storm to maroon the ship, the passengers and crew alike quickly fall asleep. After wandering and observing, Agus eventually submits to the collective dormancy. When she arrives at her destination, she is greeted not by the rest of the theater company or a local welcoming party, but by an island full of people reciting Shakespeare. As bemusement turns to frustration, Agus meets someone at a grocery store — first seen helping shoppers with their lines — who claims to be Ariel, as in literally the (fictional) character Agus is to play. “I know you,” Agus exclaims in disbelief to a blank stare, “you’re not Ariel. You’re the Spanish actress Irene Escolar. I saw you recently in a film by Jonás Trueba.”
Escolar is indeed the performer, and it stands out that Patiño would cast two women to play his film’s titular character. Ariel, a spirit serving Prospero (the wizard often read as an authorial insert), was written with male pronouns, and though for centuries between the Elizabethan era and the present the role was generally played by women, recent productions and film adaptations have more often returned to casting men in the role. Perhaps this is in keeping with Piñeiro’s focus on the women in Shakespeare’s play; the only woman with lines in The Tempest is Miranda, Prospero’s daughter. Sycorax, Ariel’s previous captor, is dead before the action of the play begins. In any case, Escolar’s Ariel explains that the island is inhabited by Shakespeare’s characters (and a few interlopers, including Beckett’s Malone).
When Agus finally finds the actors (Hugo Torres and José Diaz) whom she previously saw play Prospero and Caliban, they here identify only as Trinculo and Stephano, similarly unaware of any alternative identities. Curiously, despite this intensely meta premise, Patiño only breaks the fourth wall for a moment, which his characters quickly think better of. Instead, Muñoz and Escolar exist in a space between themselves and their characters, with the former assisting the latter both in embodying Ariel and in keeping the island functioning. Breaking from a fairly easygoing pace, the film’s ending is diegetically rushed, as both Ariels help the island’s inhabitants to finish their plays before sundown, but the liminal space the actors come to occupy becomes far more compelling than the specifics of the dialogue or plot. In these movements, Patiño’s film may be more accessible than most of Piñeiro’s Shakespearean adaptations, and it boasts broader comedic references to the Bard’s own plays that afford a welcome amiability to the strange proceedings. But even amidst such strengths across the board, Ariel is perhaps most valuable as a showcase for two exceptional actresses, operating here at the peak of their powers.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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