Dir: Valentina Maurel | Drama, France, Costa Rica 2026
There are films that tell stories, and then there are ones that seem to reopen wounds the body had quietly learned to live with. Valentina Maurel’s Forever Your Maternal Animal belongs unmistakably to the latter.
Returning to San José, Costa Rica, after years in Europe, Elsa (a thoughtful Marina de Tavira) has back come home to reconnect with her family in what will be a tense reunion. What she discovers is a household that is slowly unravelling. Her younger sister has become withdrawn and troubled, her parents are no better: her father is pursuing various romantic encounters, her mother writing erotic poetry.
This deceptively simple idea of reconnection soon turns into a voyage of discovery, as the young woman carefully digs through layers of memory, resentment, and something far more primal. What emerges is not so much a portrait of a family, but of a closed ecosystem that is unstable, almost feverish. Even the house seems to take on a personality of its own. The relationships stagnate and regenerate in the same way. Elsa’s sister, drifting into esoteric belief and quiet disintegration, feels less like a real person character and more like a manifestation: a body reacting to invisible pressures.
Best known for her 2022 feature debut, I Have Electric Dreams, Maurel’s work has always been visceral and palpable, but here it becomes almost invasive. You really feel the sweat, the claustrophobia, the sticky, suffocating intimacy of this family’s shared bonds. Maurel’s regular DoP Nicolas Wong captures these vignettes of family life with his limpid camerawork. Random conversations often drift into silence, the dialogue dissolving into glances, and glances into something closer to accusation.
There is a brutality in how the film approaches motherhood. Rather like in La Perra, motherhood is seen not as comfort, but as a biological trap, that feels restrictive rather than nurturing. The mother figure is so preoccupied in her own devices she has left behind a vacuum that both daughters attempt to fill and ultimately weaponise.
If I Have Electric Dreams was about the violence of existing, Forever Your Maternal Animal is about the impossibility of ever leaving that violence behind. Maurel doesn’t offer catharsis—she offers an observational drama that doesn’t attempt to come up with a resolution, and some may find this frustrating. Ultimately the director asks us simply to accept her characters in their state of endless flux. It is not an easy watch. It is not meant to be.
Screening in Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2026