The Ivy
Drama • 2025 • 1h 38m
Hiedra
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
In an orphanage, Julio takes care of the little ones as if protecting the reflection of his own wound. His encounter with Azucena, a woman marked by her past, opens a fragile and unexpected bond that leads them toward a landscape where absence and desire intertwine.
Perhaps there are people capable of living without such concerns. But for those like us, the fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing for years the shadows of vanished parents.
— Kazuo Ishiguro
Hiedra presents itself as a mirror of traumas, desires, and absences: a work that rejects reassuring narrative formulas and instead slips into the folds of the psyche, where identity and relationships intertwine like ivy clinging to ancient walls.
— Kazuo Ishiguro
Hiedra presents itself as a mirror of traumas, desires, and absences: a work that rejects reassuring narrative formulas and instead slips into the folds of the psyche, where identity and relationships intertwine like ivy clinging to ancient walls.
At the center of the story is Azucena, a woman in her early thirties, marked by a past trauma that forced her to abandon what could have been — a child, a different life — wandering in search of something that eludes her. Her attention rests on a group of orphaned youths living in an institution, soon to leave their temporary refuge. Among them is Julio, a seventeen-year-old with a striking presence who, in his care for the younger children, seems to possess a maternal instinct, almost an innate vocation. He tends to the infants with dedication, inquiring whether their mothers return, as if his gesture were a way to prevent others from enduring the same fate that has shaped his life.
Gradually, social distance, the barriers of time and wounds soften, and the relationship between Azucena and Julio takes the shape of a possible reconnection — real or imagined. But “reconnecting” does not mean rebuilding as before: the film does not suggest nostalgic restoration, but rather a new, fragile, unstable, yet necessary weaving. They approach, brush against one another, intuiting each other like distorted mirrors, and we never know if what unites them (or what they wish to unite) is real or symbolic.
The stylistic hallmark of Hiedra is a gaze that is skin: the camera lingers on close-ups, minimal gestures, bodily pulses, breath, the texture of flesh. Through these micro-perceptions, Barragán suspends time: each frame seems to hold a moment that cannot be placed firmly in past or present. It is in this suspension that the horizon of existence dwells: everything lost remains as potential, and everything desired is already here, in germ, even if not yet fully realized.
In her declared authorial intent, Barragán states that she seeks “a disordered, unresolved desire” and is drawn to the ambiguity flowing beneath the surface of the story. This attitude permeates the film: there is never certainty, only a subtle veil, a substantial suspension.
The theme puts into tension some essential polarities: absence and presence, body and void, gesture and silence. Azucena is a “creature without territory, a woman frozen in time” acting on instinct, driven by a hunger for closeness. Julio experiences the absence of his mother as a wound and assumes, toward the younger children, a paternal and maternal role simultaneously, as if building for them a place of refuge he never had. In this dynamic, the film becomes a social reflection on the condition of children without families: bodies suspended in a no-man’s land, where the community becomes a fragile substitute for lost roots.
The landscape — particularly the sequence toward the volcano — takes on a mythical value: a liminal space, a horizon that separates and unites, an altar where the characters confront their wounds and roots. In that primordial realm, every boundary dissolves, and what was broken can be reconnected, but not as before: in a new, surreal, uncertain, fragile form.
Among the film’s strengths is the direction of the actors: Barragán guides their expressions — even those that seem involuntary — with vigilant precision, communicating, through the eloquent gazes of non-professional actors, a community of bodies as sites of truth. The co-presence of Azucena’s vulnerability and magnetism gives shape and substance to the emotional void she inhabits.
Even aspects that might seem like “limitations” become poetic resources: the discontinuous rhythm is not weakness but breath, a vital ripple reflecting the fragmented movement of memory and desire; the early part of the plot, which seems to weaken, becomes an opportunity to dwell in the indistinct, allowing the viewer to linger in the unsaid; the final fantastical turn is not an escape but a radical opening, a chance to imagine existence beyond verisimilitude. Even the imbalance between the two protagonists, with Julio more opaque and Azucena more intense, becomes a metaphor for the disproportions governing human relationships: not arithmetic equality, but generative asymmetry.
Hiedra invites reflection on what it means to “return” and whether it is truly possible to return. It suggests that there is no “before” to reclaim, but rather an “other self” — imperfect, unstable — toward which to move. Where rationality fears ambiguity, the film dwells at the margins and in shadow, suggesting that life itself is a weaving of uncertain bonds: never secure, perhaps still possible.
Ultimately, it is an experience that demands the audience’s attention and openness, offering a glimpse into marginal realities often overlooked and unknown. It is a film that artistically bridges the distance between the interior and the visible, between the individual and the community, transforming personal experience into something social and political.
An encounter with rare, indispensable, disruptive, unusual, necessary cinema… poetic yet radical, capable of looking at the margins with profound authenticity.
A finale, two bodies, a liberation, a longed-for, owed act.
An encounter with rare, indispensable, disruptive, unusual, necessary cinema… poetic yet radical, capable of looking at the margins with profound authenticity.
A finale, two bodies, a liberation, a longed-for, owed act.
The truth is, you can become an orphan again and again and again. The truth is, it will happen. And the secret is, it will hurt less and less each time, until you feel nothing. Trust me.
— Chuck Palahniuk
— Chuck Palahniuk
