‘La perra’ Cannes Review: Dominga Sotomayor Returns with a Lyrical and Unsettling Drama

Yuki is, in a way, a vessel for Silvia, the protagonist of La perra, the new film by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, loosely adapted from the novel by Pilar Quintana and relocated to an island off the Chilean coast. The moment Silvia sees her—one among a litter of restless, almost simian puppies—something wordless passes between them. The connection is so immediate she practically pulls the dog away from a girl who wanted her too. As days go by, Silvia becomes something like a mother, a guardian, a companion. Her boyfriend Mario (David Gaete) watches this devotion with a mixture of puzzlement and quiet suspicion, as if unsure whether he understands it—or perhaps afraid that he does.

Silvia—played with remarkable precision by Manuela Oyarzún—makes a living cleaning houses and gathering seaweed along a rugged coastline populated by working-class families, where wind and salt seem to shape not just the land but the people. Among the modest homes stand a few elegant vacation houses owned by wealthy outsiders who rarely appear. One of them, which Silvia obsessively tends despite its prolonged emptiness, becomes a strange sanctuary: the only place where she disciplines Yuki, where affection briefly gives way to boundaries.

The film initially unfolds with a quiet, almost romantic vitality in the bond between woman and dog, a fragile harmony shaped by routine and shared solitude. But that balance fractures the day Yuki disappears—suddenly, inexplicably. Silvia and Mario search for her, combing the landscape with growing dread. When hope fades, the film turns inward, folding back into the 1990s, when Silvia was a preteen living on that same island with her family. The abandoned house she now cleans—eerily reminiscent of Villa Malaparte as seen in Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard—was once alive with its visiting owners: a father (played by Selton Mello), a mother, and a son Silvia’s age.

What unfolds in that contained stretch of time reframes everything. It reveals the roots of Silvia’s attachment, the depth of her grief, and the fractures beneath her quiet demeanor. The film doesn’t spell these things out so much as let them surface—like something long submerged, finally breaking through. When the narrative returns to the present, it does so altered: the calm we witnessed before now feels charged, shadowed by what has been and what lingers unresolved. The connection between Silvia and Yuki remains, but its tenderness is threaded with unease.

La perra is, on one level, a story about motherhood, loss, and the emotional debris such experiences leave behind. But it is equally a film about a place—its winds, its textures, its silences. About a community marked by labor and restraint: sun-scorched faces, gestures measured, smiles scarce. And about the secrets that settle into landscapes like sediment. Sotomayor spends long stretches simply observing the dog, letting it roam, drift, exist. The world is often filtered through Yuki’s presence, as if the film itself were trying to unlearn human hierarchies of meaning. In doing so, it moves away from the more conventional narrative mechanics of the novel and embraces a sensory, intuitive mode—one that understands adaptation not as translation, but as reinvention.

It is in these moments—along with the film’s occasional, almost surreal brushes with Brazilian telenovelas, reality singing shows, and other fragments of mediated life—that La perra finds its most compelling form. It thrives when it leans into atmosphere, ambiguity, and the quiet strangeness of Silvia’s inner world, rather than when it edges toward a more familiar, trauma-driven arc.

After the luminous De jueves a domingo and Tarde para morir joven—and following the somewhat uneasy detour of Limpia, a Netflix film—Sotomayor manages here to merge the observational delicacy that defines her cinema with a more structured, literary narrative framework. The result is a film that feels both grounded and elusive, anchored in a story yet constantly slipping beyond it. She shapes it decisively, bends it to her rhythm, and turns it into something at once intimate and opaque: a story about a dog, her owner, and everything the world seems to know—but prefers not to say.