113 min | R | May 12, 2023 | IFC Films
A trans woman returns home to care for the dying mother who threw her out decades ago. The mother no longer recognizes her. Monica nurses the woman who refused to know her, and the film never lets her say who she is.
Monica is a trans woman scraping by in California when her brother calls about their dying mother. She drives back to the family home she left years ago. Her mother Eugenia is fading from a brain tumor and does not recognize the daughter she once cast out as a son. Monica becomes a caregiver to a woman who would not have her. Andrea Pallaoro’s film is about the wound that never closed and the impossible math of tending to the person who inflicted it.
Trace Lysette plays Monica with a stillness that holds enormous pressure underneath. She works in long silences and small physical gestures. The way she steadies herself before entering a room tells you everything about the cost of coming back. Patricia Clarkson plays Eugenia with the cruelty and confusion of dementia, lucid one moment and lost the next, and she never softens the character into easy sympathy. Emily Browning plays Laura, the sister-in-law, with a warmth that becomes the only place Monica can exhale. Adriana Barraza plays the housekeeper Leticia as a quiet witness to the whole arrangement.
Pallaoro directs from a script he wrote with Orlando Tirado, and he shoots the entire film in the boxed-in Academy ratio. The narrow 1.33 frame traps Monica in the center and crops out the world around her. Bodies get cut off at the edges. Faces sit isolated against negative space. The camera holds on Monica from behind or in tight profile so that we watch her watching, and the framing makes her a stranger in her own family’s house. The restraint is the argument. The film denies the catharsis of confrontation because Monica is denied it too.
This is a film about caring for someone who never let you exist. Monica washes and feeds and comforts a mother who calls her by no name at all. The reconciliation she might want is off the table because Eugenia cannot offer it and may not deserve to. Pallaoro builds the whole picture around that absence and refuses to fake a resolution. The reward is not forgiveness. The reward is that Monica shows up anyway.