VENICE 2026 Giornate degli Autori
Review: Salón de belleza
- VENICE 2026: Nathalia Acevedo makes her directorial debut, turning a beauty salon into a refuge for the dying in a radical and sensorial film hovering between bodies, memory and disquiet
It begins as if in the depths of the ocean, immersed in a silent, liquid dimension. The frame then widens and we realise we’re looking at an aquarium, one of many populating a beauty salon which has been transformed into a refuge for the dying. It’s based upon this image, suspended between wonder and unease, that Nathalia Acevedo develops Salón de belleza, which was presented in competition in Venice’s 23rd Giornate degli Autori line-up. Making her directorial debut, the Mexican actress has adapted Mario Bellatin’s eponymous novel, sacrificing its linear form to turn it into a primarily sensorial experience.
In an unnamed city, the Individual - played by Belgian dancer, choreographer and actor Sam Louwyck - takes in people at the end of their lives in what was once a temple to beauty. Through brief incursions into the past, we see the salon as radiant, populated by a queer community dyeing their hair, dancing, singing and gathering in a free, inclusive environment. In the present, however, these same rooms are traversed by bodies ravaged by illness, faces etched with fear, and people lying on cots awaiting death.
Acevedo pares dialogue down to the essentials and allows bodies, sounds, gestures and spaces to carry the narrative forward. A voice-over conveys the Individual’s reflections as raw images of a food market unspool, between butchered animal carcasses and still-alive crustaceans. It doesn’t matter whether or not these fragments are immediately decipherable: the film proceeds by associations and detours, with meaning deriving more from the juxtaposition of images than from the plot.
Water is the motif that binds this suspended universe together: both the water in the aquariums and the water called to mind by submerged statues carpeted with algae, as if surfacing from a forgotten land. Together with fire, it becomes part of a practically metaphysical geography: the salon is attacked and set ablaze and still seems immersed in another time and space. In the background, church choirs add a sacred dimension to a place where beauty now appears irretrievably consumed by death.
Acevedo’s choices are radical and not without risk. The accumulation of symbolic images and the all- but-relentless gloom can make the film feel oppressive, and certain digressions — from raw scenes of casual sex to fights between men — seem to belong to a deliberately fragmented universe which sits closer to dream than to any kind of narrative. Rather than depicting death, Acevedo invites us to linger on the threshold that precedes it, where memory bursts into the present and care becomes the last possible gesture we can make. The salon isn’t just a place where people die: it’s a space where bodies are received when society has already cast them out. And in the passage from beauty to decay, from colour to half-light, the film delivers an austere meditation on the fragility of existence and on the enduring option of caring for one another.
Salón de belleza was produced by Kintsugi Cine (Mexico) in co-production with Farol (France). International sales are being handled by The Pool Films who are based in Paris.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 08/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Salón de belleza
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