‘Flies’ Berlinale Review: An Unexpected Roommate
A solitary woman who rents out a room near a hospital reluctantly takes in a young boy searching for news of his sick mother, forming an unexpected bond over a few difficult days.
It’s been said more than once — including here — but it bears repeating. In a Mexican cinema landscape often marked by solemnity, heaviness, darkness, and violence, the films of Fernando Eimbcke tend to arrive like a balm, like what people once called “a breath of fresh air.” His work carries a sense of childlike curiosity, playfulness, tenderness, and human warmth that rarely surfaces not only in that country’s cinema, but in many others. As was also the case with the delightful Everything Else is Noise by Nicolás Pereda — another outlier within Mexican filmmaking — Flies leans into humor and lightness even as it approaches a subject that is, at its core, quite serious.
Led by Teresita Sánchez, Moscas tells a familiar story in the key of humanist comedy, in a way that might recall a film by Charles Chaplin or even the gentler strains of Italian neorealism. Unlike the elaborate and colorful Olmo, which toured festivals last year after a twelve-year absence, this new film embraces a more austere black-and-white palette, just a handful of locations, and no more than three central characters. That’s all it needs to tell — with the quiet grace of a fairy tale — the story of an unexpected bond between two people who, for very different reasons, have ended up largely on their own.
In other hands, and in a different tonal register, Flies might easily have slipped into the realm of overly sentimental dramedy; its narrative framework certainly contains the ingredients for that. But the director of Duck Season relies instead on humor, restraint, and even touches of the absurd to follow the misadventures of this easily irritated woman and the small, unruly child who enters her life over the course of a few intense days.
Sánchez plays Olga, a woman of perpetually sour disposition whom we repeatedly see attempting — unsuccessfully — to swat away the flies that bother her. In need of money, she rents out a spare room in her home to relatives visiting patients at the nearby hospital. Her rules are strict and non-negotiable: no use of the kitchen, keep bathroom visits brief, and above all, “don’t tell me anything about your sick family member.” Like the flies, she prefers to get rid of them quickly.
Into this tightly controlled world arrive young Cristian (a revelation in Bastián Escobar) and his father Tulio (Hugo Ramírez), who are there to accompany the boy’s hospitalized mother. The room is rented only to the father, who nonetheless sneaks Cristian in with him. As tensions with Olga begin to mount, Tulio decides it would be better for the child to stay behind while he disappears for long stretches of time visiting his wife or looking for work. Soon, Cristian finds himself without news of his mother — children aren’t allowed into the hospital alone — and with no sign of his father. When his phone is stolen on the street, his chances of contacting him vanish entirely. It’s then, perhaps inevitably, that the once distant and irritable Olga has little choice but to help the boy in his small but urgent quest.
Despite everything surrounding him, Cristian is lively, talkative, funny, and adventurous. He loves old-school video games — the Space Defenders variety — and proves remarkably skilled at them. But he’s far from calm or quiet, which only adds to Olga’s growing irritation. Until the lack of news forces her into a reluctant position of care. Eimbcke never spells it out, but it’s clear Olga has endured some painful experience in the past and would rather avoid emotional entanglements altogether — especially with a child.
The film unfolds as a gentle comedy of errors: Cristian bouncing a ball around the room, making a mess, testing Olga’s patience; his candid attempts to charm hospital receptionists into letting him sneak inside rarely going as planned. Eimbcke finds the humor in each of these situations without ever tipping into the saccharine. There’s a dryness to the comedy — reinforced by the near absence of incidental music — that keeps Moscas from becoming cloying. It remains, at heart, a drama occasionally interrupted by the absurdities of everyday life.
Once again, Eimbcke demonstrates his remarkable ability to work with young performers, and Escobar joins the long list of children and teenagers who have flourished under his direction. Meanwhile, the star of The Chambermaid has by now become a guarantee of emotional authenticity, bringing to life characters that are always more layered than they first appear. Yet the film’s quietly magical glow comes from the filmmaker’s steady command of tone and material. In his hands, these stories of growing up, of fragile familial bonds, and of comic misadventure tend to leave behind a simple but lasting smile: the sense of having briefly shared with a filmmaker a way of looking at the world, and at the people who move through it.
