The Beloved (El Ser Querido) Film Review

Javier Bardem is excellent in The Beloved (El Ser Querido), which works better as a portrait of behind the scenes on a film shoot rather than a father-daughter tale.

It’s not a winning strategy for rebuilding family ties, and it ends up leaving The Beloved disjointed, even if there’s so much else here that works quite well.

Javier Bardem channels his inner Coppola to play Esteban Martínez, a film festival-friendly Spanish director who’s returning to his homeland to make his first film there in many years. The variety of directors and locations Bardem has worked with over the years has been key to his broad appeal, and he’s likely taken inspiration from some of them for his role as Martínez. Not that he needs to, though; Bardem has played plenty of megalomaniacs in his time, and Martínez fits nicely into his roster of domineering but fragile men. He has to charm cast and crew into promising their best, while berating them furiously when they can’t deliver in the moment. Whether they want to or not, many directors will see themselves in Bardem’s fantastic performance, which holds these contradictions together loosely yet credibly.

Martínez’s latest project, Desert, is a historical drama, and his cast is almost complete. The Beloved opens with a lunch meeting at a restaurant between Martínez and his first choice for the female lead, namely his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo). They haven’t met in a while, and their relationship has been distant enough that any encounter could tip it either way. Of course, Martínez wants to use this opportunity to foster a stronger bond, and their meeting is cordial. That is, what we can see of it is cordial.

Sorogoyen films the conversation tightly over his actors’ shoulders, to the point that the back of one actor’s head partially obscures the other’s face. It’s a disarming and formally grating move that only gets explained in a bout of meta commentary later in the film, but the prolonged length of the scene and the awkward framing threatens to lose the viewer with its pretentious confrontation. If nothing else, the director is letting us know that he’s throwing us into the deep end of this film shoot and this relationship.

What The Beloved captures about this relationship is both sides’ willingness to work towards a stronger connection, as well as the fragilities in both that prevent it from being fully realized. As the alcoholism of Martínez’s past is revealed, and similar resentful behaviour emerges in Emilia, Sorogoyen extinguishes certainties about where this will go. Nothing is guaranteed in the chaos of a film shoot. As with The Beasts, Sorogoyen eschews easy morality in exchange for immersion in a hell of people’s own making (A rural Spanish farm there and, in this case, an intense film shoot). 

Martínez will be tough to work for, and some crew will leave, but he is the boss that must be obeyed. It’s not fair, but it’s the reality of the situation. In the face of all this, Emilia has to cope with the double burden of impressing both her director and her father. Luengo has impressed in Spanish television and features (She stars in Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, also playing at the Cannes Film Festival), and she holds her own against Bardem’s cruel master, bringing emotion to the piece that her father cannot be seen to show lest his authority on set be undermined.

The familial dynamics that play out in The Beloved are pleasantly relatable, but that also means that there’s potential for so much to go unresolved. It’s not a spoiler that the relationship will not play out as pleasantly as everyone hopes, and this grounded approach sits well with Sorogoyen’s depiction of a busy, messy film shoot. It just means that the lack/refusal of growth sits alongside the character’s hopes for one another, doomed to undermine them. From an audience perspective, it may not satisfy, but Sorogoyen was never out to placate anyone. The Beasts took a radical narrative turn in its final act, where The Beloved never signposted any destination beyond the film set. The audience is forced to confront its own complicity in wishing better for these characters, even though they repeatedly make it clear they may not deserve it.

The relationship between father and daughter evolves between the setups and takes on the set, and Sorogoyen must have borrowed from his own extensive experience to re-create the thick atmosphere of frustration such environments cultivate. Flubbed takes, arguments, firings and hirings keep the familial drama percolating, while also affording Sorogoyen some wonderful opportunities for a few blows at the fourth wall. An exercise in framing a shot is itself framed within the borders of a monitor, as Martínez works out how he wants his film to look. The Beloved is a film that focuses on the messiness of creation, though the refusal to compromise on expectations has a mixed effect.

The Beloved (El Ser Querido) premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 2026.