19/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: Valentina Maurel’s drama has a seductively hectic energy and boasts some fantastic female protagonists

Mariangel Villegas and Daniela Marín Navarro in Forever Your Maternal Animal

There’s something pleasantly hectic about Forever Your Maternal Animal, Valentina Maurel’s Un Certain Regard entry at the Cannes Film Festival. It feels like a road movie, with everyone constantly running around as if they’re high, but they rarely go very far, and their destination remains unclear.

This is especially true for Elsa (Daniela Marín Navarro), who returns to Costa Rica after years abroad. She used to live in Europe and, at least according to some, looks down on everything and everyone she sees. This includes her mother, Isabel (Marina de Tavira), who’s going through an identity crisis, and her broke younger sister (Mariangel Villegas), who believes in God and the Illuminati, and claims she’s saving herself for marriage – but spirits still violate her every night. Quite the welcoming party.

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These could be some of the best female characters at Cannes this year: completely delulu, infuriating and fun. They are connected, but they don’t really know – or like – each other. And they don’t know themselves either. Elsa is the very definition of adrift: obviously looking for something and ready for a change, but she has no idea what it would even look like. The same goes for her sister and mother. The latter is also dealing with the fact that her first, and probably best, book of poems is being reissued; she reacts by having the bags under her eyes removed. It’s hilarious and so, so relatable, how nobody here approves of anyone else’s choices. “Getting facial surgery isn’t feminist,” says Elsa to her mother, yet she’s the one who has sex with a guy who still has a girlfriend. What a mess.

Maurel is so good at capturing what it feels like to be lost, whatever your age. It’s such a lonely sensation. She shows women who don’t find any comfort in the usual societal roles or who, like the girls’ mother, have to reinvent themselves again after their “duties” are over. With her forgotten work receiving renewed attention, she’s looking back at her choices, and damn, she’s not happy with them. That’s why she needs her space now, even though the girls clearly need her. She’s focusing on being a woman again – not someone’s mum.

Elsa eventually starts to see it, faced with these old poems full of sexuality – sexuality she had probably never even suspected. Sex seems to come easily to her, but it might be a pose. After all, the walls scream the word puta at her wherever she goes. It might just be a film about growing up, and about realising that the people closest to you have either moved on or are no longer waiting for you, and your family home is all locked up. You’re on your own, kid; you always have been.

Forever Your Maternal Animal is a Belgian-French-Mexican co-production staged by Wrong Men, Geko Films, Pimienta Films and Tres Tigres. It is sold overseas by Heretic.