‘My Dearest Señorita’ Review: Netflix Reimagines a Controversial Spanish Classic for a More Inclusive Era

Caught between The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—which represented France and ultimately won—and Jan Troell’s The New Land, a curious film produced under Francoist Spain slipped into the Oscar nominations: My Dearest Señorita, directed by Jaime de Armiñán and written by José Luis Borau. In it, José Luis López Vázquez played Adela, a woman in her forties who discovers she is, in fact, “a man”—or, in contemporary terms, intersex. Taking that premise as a starting point and updating its now dated framework into a more LGBTQ+-friendly landscape, this reimagining directed by Fernando González Molina and produced by Los Javis sets out to reclaim and reinterpret the core idea behind that peculiar classic.

Rather than bringing the story into the present, the film relocates it to the late 1990s and early 2000s, swapping the original’s Galicia for Pamplona. Adela (Elisabeth Martínez) is the woman in question: shy, labeled a “spinster,” still living with her mother and grandmother, neither of whom has ever told her the truth about her condition. She is unusually tall, often mocked for her looks, but has never suspected anything beyond that—despite never having menstruated. Her quiet routine—marked by visits to the local priest (Paco León) and a tentative flirtation with a neighbor—shifts when she meets Isabel (Anna Castillo), sparking an undeniable attraction. But Adela hesitates, withdraws, and ultimately feels betrayed.

Despite her mother’s resistance, she consults a doctor who reveals the “secret”: Adela was born intersex, and her parents chose to have her surgically assigned female at birth. The revelation is shattering. From that point on, the film follows her attempt—embracing a more masculine identity—to rebuild her life in Madrid, in an environment and among people radically different from those she left behind in Pamplona. What unfolds is a complicated journey, full of setbacks and reversals, where fear, trauma, and the tentative support of a new community collide as they try, again and again, to pull her out of her shell.

Adela—or A.D., as she later renames herself—moves through a process of discovery and self-assertion that is equally marked by confusion and guilt. González Molina crafts a film that blends provocative ideas about the fluidity of identity with dialogue that often veers into the didactic, at times sounding as though lifted from self-help manuals aimed at those reinventing or redefining themselves, with all the risks and anxieties that entails.

The people surrounding her—family aside—are strikingly kind: even the village priest proves more open-minded than most of his peers. In Madrid, she shares an apartment with a liberal, pansexual couple (Manu Ríos and Lola Rodríguez), as well as a trans dominatrix (Argentine artist and performer Delphina Blanco), gradually forming a circle that encourages her to open up—no easy task for a protagonist still shaped by deep-seated trauma.

The director of Palmeras en la nieve, working from a script by Alana S. Portero, approaches the material with a certain caution. His staging is competent but rarely daring, and he doesn’t always land on the most convincing or dramatically effective solutions. At times, the film drifts into a kind of progressive fable, imagining a world far gentler than reality tends to be. Even within that softened framework, however, My Dearest Señorita works as an update of a theme that has undergone a profound transformation since the 1970s. Its broad, generous, and optimistic perspective ultimately stands as the film’s greatest strength. What it lacks in boldness, it compensates for with empathy.