‘Forever Your Maternal Animal’ Cannes Review: Valentina Maurel’s Family Portrait of Sisterhood and Chaos

After her striking debut Tengo sueños eléctricos, which premiered to acclaim at the Locarno Film Festival, Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel returns to similarly volatile terrain: fractured families, emotional instability, and unconventional ties. Forever Your Maternal Animal revisits that universe with a curious twist, reuniting part of the same cast (the father and one of the daughters) while reshuffling dynamics and perspectives. This time, the emotional core lies in the tense, often combustible relationship between two sisters.

Elsa (Daniela Marín) has just returned to Costa Rica after years studying in Belgium, leaving behind her Scandinavian boyfriend, Sven. What begins as a temporary visit soon morphs into something far more engulfing, as she gets pulled back into the peculiar gravitational field of her family—a space that feels at once suffocating and strangely magnetic. The film subtly frames this as both a cultural clash and a reluctant re-immersion, as Elsa confronts aspects of her home country she may have outgrown—or never fully understood.

Her first collision is with her mother, Isabel (Marina de Tavira), a mildly self-absorbed writer who has just undergone cosmetic surgery ahead of the re-release of her first poetry book—an erotically charged work Elsa finds more embarrassing than empowering. Isabel claims to love her daughters but insists she’s done raising them; now it’s time to focus on herself, co-opting feminist rhetoric in ways that feel both sincere and oddly distorted. Meanwhile, their father Nahuel (Reinaldo Amién) drifts through life with bohemian detachment, more invested in his very young new girlfriend—“she’s of legal age,” he insists—than in his daughters. His tone-deaf gestures, like gifting one of them a pair of sneakers that didn’t fit said girlfriend, are met with predictable rejection.

But the film’s most fascinating and destabilizing presence is Amalia (Mariangel Villegas), Elsa’s younger sister. Twenty years old, she’s a volatile collage of contradictions: a radical feminist and devout Christian, animistic, deeply superstitious, and highly susceptible to conspiracy theories circulating online. Her worldview is governed by paranoia—she refuses to answer the door, convinced she’s at risk of being targeted by pedophiles. “You’re past that age,” Elsa tells her, baffled. Amalia moves through a strange orbit of equally eccentric friends, confrontational toward everyone, and spiritually tethered to a former nanny who is no longer physically present in her life.

She also inhabits the family home, a space that mirrors her mental state: cluttered, humid, chaotic, borderline unlivable. Suspicious of a new maid, she refuses to let her in, leaving Elsa to mediate both practical and emotional breakdowns. Yet Elsa is far from stable herself. Her relationship with Sven, her boyfriend abroad, begins to unravel, while she engages in a series of increasingly detached sexual encounters in the sterile coldness of her Airbnb. Over the film’s 108 minutes, these parallel trajectories—familial and romantic—spiral toward increasingly fraught, even dangerous territory.

Maurel refrains from passing judgment on her characters. Elsa may initially appear as a surrogate for rationality amid the dysfunction, but that perception gradually erodes. Her mother, at one point, makes it explicit: “I’m more worried about you than your sister.” Elsa finds herself caught between imposing a kind of “European” logic—something her family pointedly calls out—and grappling with a more syncretic, less linear way of engaging with existence. That said, Amalia’s chaotic worldview hardly registers as healthy either, and the possibility of psychiatric intervention hovers repeatedly over the narrative.

Like Maurel’s previous work, Siempre soy tu animal materno operates within a dry, unadorned urban realism. Performances are intense but controlled, never tipping into melodrama, even as the story gradually absorbs faint genre elements—a whiff of crime, perhaps—through Amalia’s dubious acquaintances, one of whom claims to be a hitman while another breeds distinctly unfriendly dogs.

What emerges is less a story of reconciliation than of uneasy coexistence. This is a family already fractured, trying not to splinter further. If the film evolves at all, it does so through a slow, contradictory process of acceptance: learning, however reluctantly, to live with others as they are—their habits, beliefs, needs—rather than as one might wish them to be. In that sense, the film echoes María Zanetti’s film Alemania, another sibling-centered drama where emotional imbalance reshapes family dynamics. Here, Amalia’s condition remains undefined, though the idea of seeking psychiatric help surfaces more than once.

Anchored by outstanding performances, a rigorously consistent tone, and striking visual precision, Siempre soy tu animal materno is a tough, sensitive drama about familial bonds, cultural dislocation, and the lingering weight of childhood trauma. Above all, it’s a bracing exploration of what it means to accept others on their own terms. A formidable second feature that firmly establishes Maurel as one of the most compelling voices in a new generation of Latin American filmmakers.