30/09/2024 - Sofía Paloma Gómez and Camilo Becerra make their feature debut with this narratively creeping, cryptic antidote to hyper-sensationalised true crime media inspired by real events

An age-old question: how do we reckon with the unresolvable product of immense trauma, both from a community and from an individual perspective? The exploitation of accounts of murder, assault and other corporeal crimes has become so prevalent and has led to an utmost commercialisation of these stories. The directorial debut by Sofía Paloma Gómez and Camilo Becerra challenges us with its take on a classic cult story that keeps only the skeleton of genre, in the best of ways: Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us trades brutal, grimy details for the ultra-personal in a welcome antidote to the usual hyper-sensationalised true crime media. Written and directed by the duo, the film had its world premiere in the Horizontes Latinos strand of the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

On a seemingly average day, psychologist Ximena (Aline Küppenheim) and her younger daughter Ada (Julia Lübbert) come home to the unexpected return of elder daughter Tamara, or Tami, (Camila Roeschmann), who had been absent for a while. She broke a window to enter and deigns to take off her sunglasses during family dinner, acting as if nothing has happened despite mysterious phone calls and an eventual visit from the police. Her “boyfriend” Raúl, we learn, is actually a cult leader who abused many of the local young women who have now made their escape. The case of Tami’s missing newborn child quickly becomes the centre of the cult investigation, forcing the family to confront everything buried underneath the surface.

With cinematography by Manuel Rebella, Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us stays as spectacle-free as possible right down to its colour grading, which creates, in large part due to its cold blue-grey palette, the impression that something more sinister is afoot. This look is never drab but instead reflects a deeply grim reality where there is no happy way out. At times, the way Rebella’s camera navigates the characters’ lives makes the film momentarily take on the quality of a home video, as if we were watching something completely raw and unfiltered.

Just as Ximena seeks to dig out the truth, Tami wants to bury it, although we never fully get in either woman’s head to get the full story, creating the slight sense of a dual unreliable narrator. With their screenplay, the directors leave the viewers with a feeling of discomfort by the end, just as we would never know the full story or the so-called “truth” in real life. Gómez and Becerra cleverly strip out much of the conventionally flashy intrigue of this kind of story in order to show the parts that are most human, leaving the rest to the imagination. Beside a crucial court scene, the truly gruesome details of what happened in the cult are never exploited, showing trust towards the audience in addition to respect for the integrity of the characters that is too great to retraumatise them only for the viewer’s enjoyment. This is a family drama, after all, not a fright fest — and there’s a time and a place for each.

Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us is a co-production between Spain’s B-Mount Film, Chile’s Storyboard Media, Chile’s La Jauría Comunicaciones, Argentina’s Murillo Cine and Argentina’s Morocha Films. Meikincine Entertainment is handling international sales.