‘Sundays’ San Sebastian Review: Faith, Doubt and a Teenage Calling

He speaks to me,” says Ainara, a 17-year-old who hears—or thinks she hears—the voice of God and is seriously considering becoming a cloistered nun. This isn’t a period piece, nor is it a Bressonian exercise, and the characters don’t belong to an especially devout community. Ainara is, on the surface, a fairly typical teenager: she has two younger sisters, a father who runs a restaurant, and—perhaps the most telling detail—a mother who died several years ago. Day-to-day, her life unfolds in the most ordinary and contemporary way: she spends time with her grandmother, is doted on by her uncles, has a cousin, school friends she occasionally goes out with, listens to the radio, and so on. True, she goes to a Catholic school and sings in the choir, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much; in fact, most of her classmates make light of the whole thing.

But one day Ainara (Blanca Soroa) tells her father (Miguel Garcés) that she wants to take one of those discernment retreats to test whether this is truly her calling. Her father—distracted by debt, neglect, and a new romantic interest—doesn’t seem all that concerned, especially because he doesn’t have to pay for it. He claims he’s on the verge of bankruptcy and already owes €310,000. Far more unsettled are her atheist, anticlerical aunt Maite (Patricia López Arnáiz), her sharp-tongued grandmother (Mabel Rivera), and her uncle Pablo (played by Argentine actor Juan Minujín). Yet none of them manage to break through Ainara’s quiet but unyielding determination.

The director of Lullaby (Cinco lobitos) weaves together emotion, mystery, and humor with remarkable ease, crafting a film that revolves around a question with no simple answer. One might suspect that Ainara, like the heroine of The Holy Girl, is confusing religious devotion with sexual desire—there is a boy she likes, though their relationship drifts in and out the way teenage romances often do. There’s also an unspoken tension with her father’s new partner, and of course the unresolved grief over her mother’s death. But the filmmaker avoids giving us any direct explanations. Ainara wants to enter a cloistered convent, with vows of silence and seclusion, and several people around her mobilize to stop her. The question is: can they?

There’s something eloquent and fascinating about the girl’s unwavering march toward her chosen path. It’s Maite who, frustrated by her niece’s decision and by her brother’s passivity, takes it upon herself to try to talk Ainara out of it. Yet Maite carries her own baggage—relationship problems, long-standing frustrations, private disappointments. Ainara’s father, in turn, comes across as a Bartleby-like figure, someone who would “prefer not to” deal with things, and who quietly convinces himself that maybe a convent is safer than a schoolyard full of hormone-charged teenagers.

Los domingos has the intelligence—at least until a finale that grows more severe in tone—to give both sides their due. It’s not a film designed to prove that Ainara is deluded and confused, nor is it a plea for the virtues of religious life. By refusing to ridicule one side or the other—or by poking fun at both equally—Ruiz de Azúa leaves the door open to interpret Ainara’s choice as one path among many. Ultimately, it’s up to us as viewers, with our own perspectives and biases, to weigh the pros and cons.

The director, whose series Querer is available online (in Argentina, it streams on Flow), works in a register that recalls Lucrecia Martel: hovering between the mystical and the everyday, between desire and devotion, and always probing those “ordinary” families whose simmering tensions eventually boil over. Ainara’s decision sets all of these latent conflicts into motion at once. Along the way, Ruiz de Azúa carves out space for humor—whether in sharp dialogue, in awkward encounters, or in the grandmother’s cutting remarks. Even Uncle Pablo joins in with jokes in his effort to dissuade Ainara, jokes that his wife doesn’t find funny at all.

In its final stretch, the film lands with a touch more force and a little less subtlety, but without ever betraying its essence—that refusal to judge its characters, that preference for shades of gray over neat divisions into heroes and villains. With remarkable formal precision and a flawless ensemble cast, Ruiz de Azúa hints at the cracks that run through families and friendships, the invisible fault lines between people who share daily life yet inhabit entirely different worlds. At an age when everything seems certain but nothing truly is, Ainara chooses to step onto one side of that divide. And the film leaves us, watching from the outside and somewhat unsettled, to make the effort to understand her choice—and, as much as possible, to draw our own conclusions.