Forever Your Maternal Animal: Film Review

Forever Your Maternal Animal is a stunning tale of homecoming and a fractured family in the often under-represented country of Costa Rica.

Maurel’s second feature, Forever Your Maternal Animal (Siempre Soy tu Animal Materno), takes aim at the fractured nature of family dynamics, Costa Rica’s place in Central America, and the feeling of disconnect when you have been away from your home country for so long. 

Elsa (Daniela Marín Navarro, of I Have Electric Dreams) turns home to Costa Rica temporarily whilst studying at university in Belgium. She finds her poet mother (Marina de Tavira, of Roma) with bruises on her face from a surgery to make herself look younger before she does press for a reissue of a collection of poems she wrote when she was young. Her father (Reinaldo Amien) is dating girls his daughters’ age whilst also being mentally absent from their lives. Her sister Amalia (Mariangel Villegas) seems to be falling into a mental health crisis, believing in spirits and ghosts, while hanging out with some unsavoury dog breeders from Nicaragua. All four members of the family are in a state of disconnect, not just from each other but also from their own lives, with the parents going through midlife crises, and the children going through quarter-life crises too.

Maurel utilises the Costa Rican city of San José superbly, showcasing the city with its warts and all. Her collaboration with cinematographer Nicolás Andrés creates some stunning sequences and creative set ups. One which stood out to me was a birds eye zoom near the beginning that just seemed to flex what the director was capable of doing even when the scene could have been shot in quite a standard way.

The narrative does feel a little tedious at times, as Elsa bounces from one family member in pain to the next. Her relationship with Amalia is touching, and the shock she feels when Amalia tells her in a deadpan way that, despite wanting to wait for marriage to have sex, there are spirits that haunt the walls of their home who rape her whilst she sleeps. It’s a revelation into the psyche of the character that shows that her mental health is perhaps a lot worse than Elsa thought.

Maurel touches on the changes Costa Rica is going through as a country, through the little things Elsa notices now that she’s back (walking down a high street as dozens of joggers surround her), and the thoughts and feelings of the characters who inhabit this city (her mother complaining about the ‘gringos who want to swim with turtles’). Costa Rica is a country that is not as cinematically represented as its other Central American counterparts, but the film successfully transports you into this world and chooses to show the country as authentically as possible through the discussions of class, sex, politics and animals.

Interesting family dynamics and gorgeous cinematography shine a light on the homecoming of a woman caught between her European studies and her dysfunctional family and country. A quicker pace would have made this family drama a little more engaging, but this is a good snapshot into Costa Rican city life.

Forever Your Maternal Animal premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard on May 16, 2026.