The debut feature from Spanish director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias is a different kind of coming-of-age story, one that finds its young protagonist Cata (Zoe Stein) taking an unexpected turn in the trajectory of her maturity. She and her younger sister Eva (Martina García Cursach) are spending the summer on the Spanish coast with their grandparents, and in the midst of a fun, casual time with the family — card games, sewing clothes, hanging out on the beach — Cata’s beloved grandmother (Marta Angelat) has a sudden fall and dies. Forastera (Spanish for “stranger” or “outsider”) is a deftly observed story about the different forms that grief can take, and how in moments of tragedy, some of the oldest and most pernicious patterns of family behavior suddenly assert themselves, undoing years of healing and sending us back to factory specs.
We see much of this tension flaring up between Cata’s grandfather Tomeu (veteran actor/Almodóvar alum Lluís Homar), a retired airline pilot, and Pepa (Nuría Prims), the girls’ mother, a somewhat tightly-wound event planner. Part of the conflict is situational, as Pepa thinks it would be best for Tomeu to sell the family home and move somewhere smaller and safer. Tomeu understandably resents Pepa’s suggestion that he cannot take care of himself. But it’s clear that the animosity between father and daughter runs deeper than that. When Tomeu speaks to Cata about his late wife, he speaks of her traditional manner, how she loved being in the kitchen, cooking and sewing and caring for others. One gets the feeling that Tomeu perceives Pepa as a closed-off career woman, judging her for making different choices.
Cata, Eva, and Pepa go through Catalina’s clothes and the girls start trying things on. For Eva, this is just dress-up, but something happens to Cata when she wears her grandmother’s dresses. She feels closer to her, and this activates unconscious inklings about a new role in the family. At 17, Cata doesn’t quite know who she wants to be, and crass as it may be to say, the death of her grandmother represents an opening for her to subtly slot herself into. Iglesias suggests early on that Cata may be starting to over-identify with Catalina, and not just because they have the same name. Twice — once on a call with Pepa, another time with a hairdresser phoning about an appointment — Cata answers her grandmother’s call and is mistaken for the older woman.
Forastera wisely steers clear of classic psychological or supernatural themes of identity swapping — Persona and Mulholland Drive being the most obvious examples. Cata’s confusion about who she is and who she’s meant to be is depicted in extremely normal terms, even though it’s clearly not a healthy path for her to take. Part of Cata’s occupation of Catalina’s role entails being a buffer and would-be peacemaker between her mother and grandfather, something very common in dysfunctional families. A young person often tries to take on the parental role as a way to combat a sense of helplessness. Although Iglesias sidesteps any notions of haunting or possession, she also shows that those ideas are powerful ones that people in pain can adopt as ways to explain the inexplicable. Catalina and Tomeu’s flickering fluorescent light in the kitchen, which they jokingly called their “ghost,” takes on new meaning for Cata, even though the cause is obviously electrical and not metaphysical.
This speaks to Iglesias’ surefooted writing and direction. She is not interested in using a family tragedy to spin a fanciful tale. But she does show how we can easily succumb to magical thinking when we are at our most vulnerable. In the opening shot, Cata and Eva are lying on the beach. Cata tells Eva that she saw a dolphin the other day while out in her kayak. Eva doesn’t believe her. Later, we see Cata encountering the “dolphin” again and see that it is an inflatable pool toy, “real” but fake. Cata understands the difference between reality and representation, the material and the symbolic. But unsettled as she is, she has decided to suspend that difference, and repair to the world of make-believe, and embrace the outsider within herself.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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