27/11/2024 - The debut feature by Asturian director Pelayo Muñiz Cabal brings the Northern Lights to Madrid

Gijón-born director Pelayo Muñiz Cabal won the 2005 FICX Young Directors Award with his short film Sístole/Diástole, and has been working across audiovisual media and theatre since. At the 2024 edition of the Gijón Film Festival, he world-premiered his first feature, Boreal [+see also:
interview: Pelayo Muñiz Cabal
film profile], in the Generación Mutante strand. What started off as a project presented at Sitges in 2017 under the name Iceberg is now Boreal, a science-fiction chamber piece where two couples succumb to the strange effects of the Northern Lights, inexplicably vivid in the Madrid skies.

The film opens with Ana (Laura Barba) driving and her adopted son, Bruno, in the back seat. It’s all very pleasant until Bruno takes a hold of his mother’s wallet and snatches the paper crane she’s been diligently hiding inside; she gets irritated and reaches back, letting go of the steering wheel to grab the wallet. Their altercation proves fatal, as Ana loses control of the vehicle and they crash. So begins Boreal – punchy and suspenseful – some time after that tragic incident and the death of Bruno.

Now, in quieter times, Ana and her patient husband, Pablo (Denis Gómez), have opened a country guesthouse in the mountains. Secluded, their life goes on. When their best friends, Guille (Raúl Tejón) and Bea (Isabel Rodes), come to visit on a rare occasion without their own son, the glossy surface of pretend happiness begins to crack under the bright-green lights of the Aurora Borealis. In terms of its narrative, Boreal reminds one of apocalypse thrillers and dramas that expose middle-class hypocrisy, but its foot is anchored deep in the science-fiction genre, which works in its favour. Tejón’s Guille is perhaps the catalyst character that, at first, impresses with an insensitive joke and kisses Ana on the lips as if they are lovers, to then cause the rupture at dinner. The dinner scene itself is carefully choreographed, even if it all flows very naturally; Muñiz Cabal is devoted to an understanding of genre as a conduit, a means for exploring anxieties, rather than a string of tropes.

There’s violence, thrills and double-crossing, and these bursts of human emotion add a melodramatic ring to the frightful sci-fi backdrop of the film. Pablo and Guille’s eyes turn verdant, and soon, everyone is being exposed to the Aurora’s supernatural effects (which are left unexplained, and for the better). Cinematographer Roberto San Eugenio circles Guille, and the editing cuts between him and the others in rapid succession to convey the mounting sense of doubt that plagues them all. “He’s having another episode,” says Bea, but the stark reality of her husband not recognising her at all visibly harms her trust. Subsequently, Boreal toys with the idea of narrative linearity and even parallel worlds, but it’s best not to reveal too much about how it does so. What matters is that Muñiz Cabal’s debut feature values risk over neatness, and in this way, he delivers a strong and convincing genre film about loss and the secrets we keep.

Boreal is a Spanish production by Nylon and Olivo Films.