La Casa [2024]

 There isn’t a dearth of memorable films foregrounded on siblings and relatives who, upon an unplanned reunion, get flooded with unresolved memories, and tenuously accomplish a semblance of reconciliation. And yet La Casa, Álex Montoya’s bittersweet, seriocomic and deftly layered adaptation of Paco Roca’s graphic novel of the same name, had an enlivening authenticity and freshness about it. The filmmaker composed it through a nuanced mix of myriad emotions – humour, warmth, nostalgia, melancholy, grief, regrets, repressed bitterness – and delicately evoked vignettes that added underlying complexities into this exceptionally intimate slice-of-life tale. The death of their aged father – once a vigorous person who became an ailing, lonely man in old age, and who meant profoundly to each of them, albeit in vastly different ways – brings together three siblings to the now barren, dust-filled house filled with echoes of the past. Their primary intent is to sell off the place. That, unsurprisingly, turns out far more difficult than they’d anticipated. Moreover, while they’ve drifted apart and their lives have taken divergent courses, they still retain fierce bonds which unravel over the course of a few days. The film’s exceptional ensemble cast comprised of David Verdaguer and Olivia Molina as José, a writer, and his editor wife; Óscar de la Fuente, Marta Belenguer and María Romanillos, respectively, as older brother Vicente, his wife and their daughter; Lorena López as the sister; and Miguel Rellán as an ageing neighbour. Exquisitely photographed in warm, muted colours and interspersed with sepia-toned Super8 reels, it’s really a mini-marvel that such a seemingly “unoriginal” film, at the risk of being seeped in contrived sentimentality, instead succeeded in being such a richly textured work and an absorbing watch.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Alex Montoya

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain