‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’ Review: A Queer Western of Myths and Realities

The idea that genre can work as a metaphorical, heightened version of reality becomes strikingly clear in The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, the curious and quietly gripping debut feature from Chilean director Diego Céspedes. Moving along the outer edges of genres like the Western and the supernatural, the film tells a story that keeps its other foot firmly planted in something far more concrete: harsh, lived reality. Perhaps it has to do with its point of view. Lidia, the eleven-year-old girl at the center of the film, sees the world through the straightforward lens of old myths and clear-cut oppositions. And through her gaze, this coming-of-age tale loops back on itself and forces those myths to crash headlong into the facts.

Lidia (Tamara Cortés) lives in a tiny mining settlement in Chile’s northern desert in the 1980s. Life there seems divided into two opposing camps. On one side are the miners, violent almost by instinct. On the other, a group of trans women who share a house where they offer—or once offered—sex work, and among whom Lidia has been raised. One of the most beloved figures of this small, dusty world is Flamenco (Matías Catalán), a trans woman who moves with the kind of confidence that suggests she runs the place, though its informal authority figure is Boa (Paula Dinamarca), something like a madam.

The miners refuse even to look at the women, convinced that doing so would make them sick, as if acknowledging their existence might infect them with something lethal. Convinced that this “curse” is real, they seem ready to wipe the women out if that is what it takes to escape it. Armed and unafraid, the women prepare to defend themselves, even if not every encounter between the two groups is violent. But the clashes escalate, and soon Lidia finds herself forced to decide whether vengeance has a claim on her.

In its staging and locations, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo initially adopts the codes of a Western. Though set in the early 1980s, the dusty settlement—little more than a handful of houses—could easily sit in the American frontier. The confrontations between the roughneck miners and the “prostitutas” follow that logic as well. But the film shifts. First into something more fantastical, tinged with fables and legends. Then into a kind of adolescent drama tied to Lidia’s own first awakenings. And just when it seems there are no more narrative turns left, Céspedes pulls aside a few more curtains and confronts both characters and viewers with something that looks a lot more like reality.

Shot on film, framed in a classic (almost square) aspect ratio, and graced with immaculate cinematography, The Mysterious Gaze… is the queer Western Pedro Almodóvar has not yet managed to make (his short with Pedro Pascal comes nowhere close). It is an ingenious and quietly playful narrative mechanism that builds poetic and game-like possibilities around a tough queer reality shaped by discrimination and its era. With a cast of gifted, largely unknown actors, and a deeply human truth that emerges in every frame, Céspedes’s film is a genuine surprise within Chilean and Latin American cinema—an original work from every angle.

It is true that over its 103 minutes the film can be somewhat winding, even confusing, with some sharply effective scenes and others that feel more capricious. But that instability is part of the experience—of discovery, of experimenting, of stumbling upon unexpected images and metaphors, even when not all of them fully land. At heart, this is a film about a chosen family facing a brutal situation, a family for whom Lidia represents both beginning and end. Love is, ultimately, what reassembles what others break apart. What repairs, at least emotionally, what the world so eagerly destroys.