More than a decade after his first feature, For the Plasma (2014), Bingham Bryant revisits his fascination with images, interpretation, and, crucially, the ways images are mediated before our eyes, with El Espejismo (Mirage). But perhaps fascination isn’t strong enough. In the case of Maria (Maria Novo), a young woman who pursues the elusive image of a man she once saw through her binoculars, something even stronger than fascination presses its advantage.
If something stronger than fascination is required to characterize Maria’s sudden change in behavior, then Bryant takes his instruction from San Sebastian (Donostia in the regional Basque language) itself. Its pervasive, militaristic architecture, the castillo on Mount Urgull a stoic sentry against occupying forces from generations past, is fertile thematic ground for Bryant’s ideas and images. The word “obsession” derives from the Latin “obsesio,” meaning a blockade, siege, or encirclement. In English, it has taken on psychological and religious connotations; an occupation of the mind against one’s will. For Maria — whose story of mounting obsession is recounted in the words of her sister Margarida (Francisca Alarcão as a young woman, and filmmaker Rita Azevedo Gomes as an older woman), and told to a young Frenchwoman (Constance Rousseau) who has come to San Sebastian to observe recently reported mirages — the experience, at once overwhelming and, crucially, inexplicable, feels cosmically aligned with her surroundings.
Maria and Margarida are students (architecture and psychology, respectively) in San Sebastian. Their lives are mundane, occupied by concerns with funding for their studies and a well-meaning but, according to Margarida, obsessed ex-boyfriend who, apparently, won’t stop following her around the city. A trip to an antiques market unites Maria with a pair of binoculars that, after looking through them from the wrong end, alter the way she sees the world. Eventually, Maria mysteriously disappears from Margarida’s life, going weeks without making contact, or offering weak excuses for her absence from their tightly integrated lives when she does.
As told by the older Margarida, these events ostensibly take place in the past, but Bryant’s approach, and certainly his material limitations (the film received a little funding from last year’s FID Development Lab), mean that this past occurs within a distinctly recognizable present. Cell phones might be scarce, but other markers of contemporary life (cars and buses, and new buildings at odds with San Sebastian’s lofty ruins) are not hidden by clever tricks. There’s a satisfaction in seeing Bryant’s time-melding strategies — which often play out within long, unbroken shots by way of simple conceits of blocking, choreography, and voiceover delivery — unify into an organized aesthetic principle; a little destabilizing but never alienating, they confer meaning about the slippery nature of perception without forcing the issue.
As high-minded as Bryant’s concepts regarding images and image interpretation can seem, Mirage delivers a quietly affecting story of sisterly love and loss. Gomes (who previously collaborated with Bryant on her 2025 FID Marseille premiere, Fuck the Polis), as the elder Margarida, is excellent, and it’s upon her warm, knowing presence that Alcarao’s younger interpretation expands and contextualizes. Novo, as well, conveys a wispy detachment with conviction, never sacrificing the audience’s hope that she can come back from the brink of her quiet emotional spiral even as she moves further away from Margarida.
Perhaps more illustrative of Bryant’s intentions, however, is Mirage’s subtle adherence to the narrative structure of conventional horror films, in which the role of a near-mythical physical object produces inexplicable effects on those who use it in ways it’s not meant to be used. Recounted from the future, Maria’s ambiguous, fantastical fate — best left unspoiled — plays like a sweetly cautionary tale; a gentle warning to Margarida’s audience of one, who is also interested in the spectre-like nature of images, to remain, like the labyrinthian fortresses of Old San Sebastian, vigilant against their advances.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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