La Perra Review | Dominga Sotomayor Crafts A Guarded Fable Of An Unravelling

Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor’s new feature, La Perra, maps a psychological canvas that’s at once opaque, elliptical and teasing. It’s a drama of refreshing freedom, both on an authorial and a receptive level. It lets us float through assumptions and backstories for a good hour before it starts filling in the blanks. This particular decision of disclosure is bound to divide audiences. Some might grudge it for explaining it away all. More generous, open-minded viewers would be swayed by the flashback’s diaphanous flow. Premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival 2026, La Perra achingly contracts and then expands the lens on its brittle heroine, Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún).

Sticking to a secluded life in an island off the coast of Chilean Patagonia, Silvia has carefully designed her routine according to her defiant rhythm alone. She maintains a rooted relationship to the inescapable aquatic environs, having spun her livelihood around it. Plunging close to the seaweed every now and then is as much need-based as a space to breathe and reassemble. Harvesting seaweed hews the pattern of her days. When she decides to take in an abandoned pup, her stunted emotional life awakens. The middle-aged Silvia encounters a swell of maternal adoration and care.

Adapted from Pilar Quintana’s eponymous 2017 novel, La Perra trails through emotional ruins. On an old shipwreck of a past, there are pathways cut forth suggesting brighter possibilities, a horizon of love and attention the pup sparks. Named after a Mexican pop singer, Yuri brings a spring in her step. DP Simone D’Arcangelo weaves in a deeply embodied tactility to the windy island landscapes. The beauty is staggering. The scale the visuals evoke is colossal, contrasted sharply with the deliberate isolation Silvia favours. The seaside cliffs provide a dramatically accentuating backdrop.

Silvia is a woman who’s long retreated to her recesses. We can tell something has happened to her. But Sotomayor arrestingly chooses to open with the aftermath, the long shadow a definitive, looming episode has cast over Silvia. She deeply values her solitude, fiercely clutching onto it. There’s a partner who drifts in and out at nights, but it’s she who remains in control. If she conceded those reins to someone else, she’d fade away. This is also a woman who might have hardened her heart a bit too much as a retaliatory response. When Yuri vanishes one morning, Silvia spirals. The bones in the closet come rattling out.

Thankfully, Sotomayor abstains from mining trauma for exploitative effects. A mid-film pivot redirects a revelatory segue to Silvia’s childhood that’s holding key secrets. Present-day scars can be traced to an early run-in with tragedy and loss. Much of our lives can find their trajectories pinned on a foundational young experience. Such moments shape, shift and shatter the entire dynamics of how we wish to stake our lives, envisage a future. A sense of family pulls into focus, one that’s no longer around in the present-day scenes. The pre-teen Silvia stuns her mostly absent father’s new family who look awed by her driving a tractor. Living far away from parental scrutiny and constraints toughened her. She has long been sturdy and completely self-reliant. When someone asks her about her mother who works on the mainland, Silvia matter-of-factly confesses that she doesn’t miss her.

But that’s not to say she’s entirely discarded longing expectation from her father. A tinge of attachment is still strong. However, the tether seems to have snapped. The father and daughter tentatively re-stir bonding yet his attention is singularly devoted to his other family whom he has brought along. The reverie cruelly breaks when Silvia gets caught up in an accident. Guilt behind her role in it has haunted her right to the current day. It’s a harrowing memory that goes on to underpin her life’s direction.

La Perra circles this impact and threads it to Silvia’s complicated , push-pull relationship with the pup. All her emotional responses are dictated by that incident. To divulge anything more would be to give away the fluidity with which Sotomayor cuts from the present to the past, folding them together into a single, contained psychological continuum. Oyarzún is quietly moving, carving out faint hopes and little joys beneath the shell of Silvia’s seemingly imperturbable reserve. Notice the gentle throb of yearning she brings when Silvia caresses an expecting mother’s baby bump. There’s a profound maternal tug that’s irrepressible and envelops her wholeheartedly with Yuri’s arrival. La Perra doesn’t aspire too audaciously. It’s modest but irreducibly sculpted with grace and lilting pathos.