’53 Sundays’ Review: Strong Performances Anchor a Familiar, Low-Stakes Netflix Family Drama

Across a career that now spans nearly three decades and around a dozen films, Catalan writer-director Cesc Gay has gradually shifted from the more distinctive, exploratory tone of his early work—titles like Krámpack, En la ciudad or Fiction—toward projects that feel more squarely mainstream, both formally and thematically. The turning point seems to have been the success of Truman, the warm, humanist dramedy starring Ricardo Darín and Javier Cámara, which firmly established Gay within what might loosely be called the commercial end of Spanish cinema.

Gay’s strengths have always been dialogue and performance. That’s where his sensibility is most precise: staging tends to revolve around actors, with mise-en-scène functioning primarily as a vehicle for character interaction. 53 Sundays operates in much the same way as his previous stage-to-screen adaptations—Sentimental being a recent and successful example—where the challenge lies in translating material written for the theater into something that feels cinematic. Here, the film follows a series of missed connections and awkward encounters between three siblings in their fifties who try, and repeatedly fail, to meet and discuss a set of unresolved family issues.

Cámara plays Julián, an out-of-work actor whose only current offer is to play a tomato in a gazpacho commercial. He’s arranged to meet his two older siblings at his apartment, and it’s his wife (Alexandra Jiménez), who also serves as the film’s narrator, who introduces us to this trio and their long history of misunderstandings. Carmen Machi plays Natalia, the middle sibling, a disciplined academic whose marriage has grown distant. Javier Gutiérrez is Víctor, the eldest, a self-described “businessman” who seems, in practice, to function more as his wealthy father-in-law’s chauffeur.

Light in tone—at least until a late attempt at emotional weight—53 Sundays unfolds as a chain of scheduling mishaps that reduce what should be a group conversation into a series of one-on-one encounters: Julián with Natalia, or Julián with Víctor. Gradually, the film reveals its central issue: the care of their elderly father, an octogenarian with memory problems who has begun to suffer accidents and conflicts with neighbors. Natalia, despite being the most professionally accomplished and time-strapped of the three, is the only one taking responsibility, while her brothers claim they can’t spare even an hour—whether to help or simply to fix a flickering lightbulb that’s been bothering him.

These imbalances mirror deeper differences in personality. The film slowly surfaces the tensions between them, built on microaggressions and quietly hurtful remarks delivered in a passive-aggressive register. Víctor has written a novel—also titled 53 Sundays—and the question of whether to tell him what they really think of it becomes a central metaphor: no one is willing to speak honestly for fear of further fracturing an already fragile, almost glacial family bond.

Gay frames all this in a light, almost airy register, leaning on familiar theatrical devices—misunderstandings, repeated mix-ups, even a running gag involving anchovies moving from plate to fridge and back again. The focus, somewhat generically, lands on the emotional myopia of these self-absorbed adults—especially the men—who struggle to see beyond their own immediate concerns. The three leads bring their considerable craft to the material (Jiménez mostly observes with a kind of gentle, resigned warmth, occasionally addressing the camera), but the script offers limited room for nuance or expansion beyond the surface.

Modest, brisk (it runs just 75 minutes), and mildly pleasant without leaving much of a lasting impression, 53 Sundays recalls, at moments, Parque Lezama, in which Juan José Campanella similarly adapted his own stage production for the screen. Here, Gay plays it safe—deliberately so—delivering what Hollywood once called a “run for cover”: a controlled, low-risk project nestled between more ambitious undertakings.