St. John’s Eve is the shortest night of the year, and it also marks the start of the northern summer. It’s a time for festivities, collective celebration, leisure, and purification. It’s also an auspicious moment, when anything can happen. And in Balearic, everything does. Water and fire, the two purifying elements shared by both pagan and Christian traditions that feed into the celebration, are present from beginning to end. A first, slightly supernatural hint comes from a chance occurrence: a house that wasn’t there the year before. Four teenagers decide to approach and explore this anomaly, only to find themselves cornered in the swimming pool by enormous black dogs. Meanwhile, some members of older generations celebrate in another house — one that has always been there — the beginning of a summer that promises nothing good. But they don’t care. After all, they’ve already lived their lives.

Balearic is a shapeshifting film. It’s genre cinema, but I couldn’t say exactly which genre. If pressed, I’d call it a mutant genre. Ion de Sosa takes tropes, scenes, ideas, shots, tools, motifs, and the visual languages of different genres, and forges them into an organic whole, where you can’t quite see the seams. The thematic centrality of the swimming pool contrasts with the film’s free-flowing structure, which never stagnates, but instead rushes frenetically from one place to another without ever revealing its next move. In its cinematography, script, and music, there are nods to films ranging from Psycho (1960) to The Wicker Man (1973), but above all to The Swimmer (1968). The idea of an interconnection between pools is here pushed to the extreme, adding fantastical elements and plenty of local seasoning.

Balearic offers two lessons more than one filmmaker in our country could learn from: first, it puts story above everything else; and second, it’s a tremendous exercise in creative collaboration, especially in the script, which draws on many different ideas yet blends them perfectly. Here, everything serves the story, and the story in turn serves whatever comes to mind for some of the most inventive minds currently making films in Spain. In fact, for some years now, seeing the names Apellaniz and de Sosa at the start of a film has been a guarantee that you’re about to watch cinema that’s interesting, alive, and rich. Balearic is their latest production, and it’s also a world unto itself.

I said “stories” in the plural because this film contains many. Each character brings an enormous complexity that is never fully explored. The writers overflow with creativity, building a world where there’s room for countless films beyond the one they’ve made. The fact that so many narrative threads remain unresolved isn’t due to a lack of ideas but to the opposite: they aren’t greedy, and they trust their creativity. This has the effect of inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in the film without feeling the need to memorize names or situations that will surely prove important later. Nothing is that simple or straightforward. One example: the film doesn’t take place in Mallorca or Ibiza, as one might expect, but on the mainland. “Balearic” is merely the name of a nightclub that the wheelchair-bound homeowner once owned decades ago, which only appears in a single scene.

The last thing worth highlighting is the music — just as mutating as the rest of the film, excellent and excellently used (again, in service of the stories). And as a bonus, they treat us to an a cappella song by Christina Rosenvinge, an artist well-known to anyone who followed post-Franco Spanish music in the ’80s and ’90s.