The heroine of “Tótem,” a new film from the Mexican director Lila Avilés, is a girl by the name of Solecito (Naíma Sentíes), or Sol for short. We are never told her age: seven or eight, perhaps, though she’s one of those naturally grave children who seem a little older and wiser than they ought—or would choose—to be. In Sol’s case, the wisdom is hard-won. She has moments of foolery and giggling, but much of the time she keeps quiet, or abstracts herself from the proceedings. The final third of the movie depicts a birthday party for her father, Tonatiuh, or Tona (Mateo García Elizondo), and where do we find Sol, as the revels get under way? Roosting on high, at rooftop level, gazing down at the fun. Somebody sends a camera up on a drone, for a laugh, to capture Sol on her perch. “Stop filming me!” she exclaims. “Leave me alone!”
The tenor of “Tótem,” in which the solemn is wreathed with the festive, is established in an early scene. Sol is being driven to the party by her mother, Lucía (Iazua Larios), and they play a game in the car: hold your breath and make a wish. Sol, without prompting, admits, “I wished for Daddy not to die.” Tona has cancer, and, when we meet him, we believe as much; he is little more than a skeleton with a smile, and this birthday will almost certainly be his last. Hence the family that assembles around him, later swelled by friends. Tona’s siblings include Alejandra (Marisol Gasé), who is first seen dyeing her hair, and Nuri (Montserrat Marañón), who is baking a cake and icing it to resemble van Gogh’s “Starry Night”—an excuse, mainly, to stay in the kitchen and get drunk. Also present is Nuri’s daughter, Esther (Saori Gurza), who is younger than Sol and more clinging; she sits atop the fridge, holding a cat, and hangs on to her mother’s legs when Nuri tries to leave the room. Tona’s elderly father, Roberto (Alberto Amador), is there, too, with a face of thunder, obsessively clipping a bonsai tree. Has he always, we wonder, been so impossible to please?
Avilés’s previous movie, “The Chambermaid” (2019), was set in a hotel in Mexico City, and shot with astringent care. The most genial of its stars, Teresita Sánchez, returns here in the role of Cruz, Tona’s nurse, who is the soul of sensible patience; notice how calmly she mentions, as the party winds down, that she hasn’t been paid in two weeks. “Tótem” is more relaxed than “The Chambermaid,” often crowded but rarely confounding, and Avilés homes in on solitary figures amid the throng. The camera watches, weaves, and waits—not so much sticking its nose in, like a meddlesome guest, as making sure that people are attended to, if only with a glance. Should their actions be of no great consequence, better still; look at Roberto, straining to pull on a sock, or Sol taking a furtive slug of wine and pulling a face. At one point, the adults do that stupid thing of parcelling their speech into bits (“che-mo-the-ra-py”), in the hope that the kids won’t understand what’s going on. Yeah, right. Sol listens in, and instantly breaks the code. Parents in the audience will recognize the dilemma: when you lock children out from what you fear they cannot bear to learn, are you protecting them or storing up harm in their hearts? And don’t they always turn the key and find out anyway?
The surprising thing about this film, given its potential for devastation, is how funny it can be. As you’d imagine, the humor wells up from anxiety; that’s why Alejandra, the most credulous of the grownups, hires a psychic to walk around the house and cleanse it of bad energy. This involves belching, buckets of water, and the ceremonial torching of a bread roll—summarized by Roberto as “satanic bullshit”—and costs two and a half thousand pesos. (“I also sell Tupperware,” the psychic adds.) And all on the day of a party! What Tona’s loved ones are doing, of course, as recorded by “Tótem” in a welter of detail, is fending off the prospect of his death by cluttering his environment with life. For good measure, some of that life is animal. The cat shatters the fourth wall, as cats will; Sol receives a goldfish named Nugget, which doesn’t bode well; a shy scorpion scurries into a crack; and the end credits are punctuated by drawings of various creatures. The only poor performance is that of a stick insect, which keeps waving its arms about. Or its legs. It should have paid attention in drama class.
There isn’t much music in “Tótem,” and what there is gets piled up in the closing stretch. In an extraordinary act of ventriloquism, we hear a rendition of “Spargi d’amaro pianto” (“Sprinkle with bitter crying”), from the mad scene in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Raise your hand if you were expecting that. Who the ventriloquist is, and how the aria slots into the plot, I leave for you to discover. Suffice to say that somehow, for reasons that I’m still mulling over, the madness touches the quick of this sad and lively tale. All that remains is for the film’s composer, Thomas Becka, to herald the climax with a surge of sounds at once jungly and industrial, and for Sol—a hauntingly thoughtful child rather than a dreamy one, with way too much on her mind—to stare straight at us, by the light of the candles on her father’s cake. She doesn’t want them, or anything else, to be snuffed out.
If you seek another awkward social gathering, on a slightly higher plane, try Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s latest movie, “I.S.S.” The title refers not to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which ceased to exist under that name in 1921 and could probably use a revival, but to the International Space Station—the clunky modular construction, orbiting our planet at a distance of some two hundred and fifty miles, that has become a byword for harmony and peace. I mean, where else can you go to the toilet in a module called Tranquility?
Ten years ago, Cowperthwaite made a serious splash with “Blackfish,” a documentary about the treatment of killer whales in captivity. When I first heard about this new project, I hoped, foolishly but fervently, that she might have hitched a ride on a shuttle and smuggled her cameras onto the actual I.S.S. Where better to study the feral behavior of trapped humans? No such luck. Instead, this is a feature film, with actors portraying a resident crew of six: three Russians plus—or, increasingly, versus—three Americans. Just arrived on board is Dr. Kira Foster, played by Ariana DeBose. Moviegoers will recognize DeBose from “West Side Story” (2021), in which, as Anita, she sported a bright-yellow halter-neck dress as opposed to a spacesuit. She also remarked to Tony, after he met and made nice to Maria, “Do you want to start World War Three?”
Fancy that. Here is World War Three, in all its finery. Gazing out of the Cupola, the primary viewing platform on the I.S.S., Kira notices a sudden fiery bloom of what she takes to be a volcano, down on the surface of the Earth. Then another bloom. And another. Holy smoke! It’s the Jets and the Sharks all over again, this time with nuclear warheads. Before long, most of the world is lit up by conflagrations, and the film is graced with an unintended and somewhat unfortunate irony: from afar, the apocalypse is quite a pretty sight.
At this juncture, you might think the astronauts should thank their lucky stars. How about clubbing together to enjoy their heavenly haven, away from the inferno? Not a chance. The senior American on the station, Barrett (Chris Messina), receives a secret message, presumably from a government bunker, with an instruction: “Your new objective is to take control of the I.S.S.” Meanwhile, his Russian counterpart, Pulov (Costa Ronin), gets much the same order from his terrestrial superiors. The rest of the movie finds the two teams tussling for supremacy, with only Kira and her opposite number, Vetrov (Masha Mashkova), known as Nika, risking a tenuous pact. To be on the I.S.S., according to Nika, can be “a spiritual awakening.” No longer. Now it’s a straight fight.
As a thriller, regrettably, “I.S.S.” fails to fulfill its mission. Any air of plausibility soon leaks out of the plot, and the whole thing drifts into silliness, tricked out with familiar tropes. (As any sci-fi fan can tell you, space walks never go as planned, and we even get a closeup of someone deciding whether or not to snip a crucial wire.) Now and then, however, there are fragments of authentic strangeness and wit; with a documentarian’s hungry eye, Cowperthwaite feeds on the challenges of zero gravity. If you’re dozing off, for instance, and you don’t fancy being cocooned like a pupa in a vertical sleeping bag, stuck to a wall, your other option is to float in a fetal curl, as if awaiting birth. In the matter of death, look and learn as one astronaut stabs another in the neck with a screwdriver; blood, rather than spurting or flowing, emerges in little red bubbles—life just fizzing away. Most teasing of all is a conversation about sex in space. “I can’t say that physics is exactly on your side up here,” Kira says. Moon shots and money shots: if any film cries out for a sequel, it’s this one. ♦