“Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” muses Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) to her daughter, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), in a display of gentle and easy affection; there is, after all, nothing profound about the statement or even the context in which it is uttered. For Elisa, the teenage protagonist of Lucía Garibaldi’s A Bright Future, the affection comes through, but so does its stifling, homiletic subtext. The unnamed streetscapes of Uruguay are tinted with pastel markers of dystopia more cosmetic than concrete, while its denizens flit about their lives, sometimes fixated — though even so rather absent-mindedly — on vague stories of an unseen “North,” where the road to paradise is being carefully paved by genetics and good social engineering. Elisa is one of the lucky candidates selected by the state to migrate over there to advance the goals of “sustainability,” chosen on account of her IQ and creativity. Her sister, Amanda, has already been, while Nélida, yearning to be with her daughters, works overtime to amass the money required to bid for a one-way ticket.
Garibaldi, to her credit, mines the most out of the contemporary milieu without pivoting to cheap absurdism. Under her watch, the film’s talking points come through unambiguously, requiring no overt dramatization to realize their import. Amidst scarcity and soulless joy, promises of abundance tend to come with expectations of conformity, and it’s precisely Elisa’s slated role — as a human worker whose physical and mental productivity will be expanded through regimes of control and social isolation — which detracts from the luster of things to come. Yet where the director’s first feature, The Sharks (2019), reduced brooding sexual tensions to ambiguous psychological shorthands, A Bright Future suffers from the opposite problem. Tantalizingly mysterious in parts, it refuses greater world-building while simultaneously laying bare the broad motivations and psychological profiles of those who wish to resist the cozy rhythms of acquiescence. In other words, cut out the vaguely sci-fi trappings, and what you’re left with is a pedestrian slice of life under capitalism.
Heightened by Arauco Hernandez’s tinctured cinematography and Cecilia Guerriero’s lightly retrofuturist production design, the film proves mostly agreeable as a work of coherent, self-contained narrative whose performances, especially those of Passeggi and Sofía Gala Castiglione (who plays Elisa’s magnetic, one-legged neighbor), lend credence to a slow-burning desire for escape and self-discovery. But its placidity and sterility are home to predictability, and once the terms are set, A Bright Future rarely ventures beyond the confines of its characters’ skin-deep convictions to posit the implications of its scenario. With most domestic animals extinct and reduced to sounds on soothing recordings, and with the common ant having inexplicably precipitated a global ecological crisis of some sort, society has turned to a benign process of eugenics inflected by visions of youth and intellectual aptitude. The details of this paradigmatic shift are not spared, however, which could either be an artistic oversight on Garibaldi’s part or her way of saying that our own prospects, despite being infinitely more risible than anything satire can muster up these days, are just as dim.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 2.
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