Sometimes cinema manages to do something that seems improbable: tell a painful story without unnecessary dramatics, explore the disturbing without cynicism, speak of despair without stripping its characters of their dignity. Kika, the first fiction feature by Belgian filmmaker Alexe Poukine, moves gracefully through that fragile terrain. What begins as a seemingly conventional story—a woman who pauses her routine to fix her daughter’s bicycle and, in that small gesture, finds a new direction—evolves into a deeply human portrait of grief, sexuality, and the ability to adapt when everything seems to fall apart.

Kika lives with her partner and daughter in a quietly stable, almost bland environment. She works as a social worker, listening to the problems of others with the patience of someone who has learned to absorb other people’s lives without letting her own overflow. Until one day, accidentally locked in a bike workshop, she meets someone who reignites a spark that had long been dormant. The infatuation is immediate, fleeting, and yet irreversible. What follows is a series of decisions—sometimes impulsive, sometimes inevitable—that push her to abandon what she had and start a new life with this newfound love. But even the most intense changes offer no guarantee of permanence, and a sudden blow of fate will once again shake her world violently. After the tragedy, Kika becomes another film—or rather, it reveals the film it truly is. Death leaves the protagonist not only emotionally shattered but also in a precarious material state that forces her to make difficult choices. There are no heroic gestures here. This is not a woman sacrificing herself for others, but someone simply trying to keep going. And in that search, unthinkable alternatives arise, like selling her used underwear or accepting work in hourly hotels. Little by little, almost without realizing it, she finds herself immersed in a world of other people’s sexual fantasies that begin to shape her new routine.

Far from indulging in easy provocation, Kika approaches the most extreme sexual practices with a mix of curiosity, empathy, and critical distance. There is no judgment, but neither is there glorification. What matters here is not the sexual acts themselves but what they reveal about the people who seek them—and what they awaken in the person who offers them. For Kika, entering this universe is less a fall than a transformation: she finds a way to stay afloat while exploring aspects of herself she had never confronted. This is not a story of redemption or a descent into hell, but something far more ambiguous: a drift between survival and self-discovery. In that sense, Kika stands apart from many films that depict sex work through paternalistic or moralizing lenses. There are no clear messages here, no moral lessons. The protagonist makes mistakes, retreats, tries again, hesitates, sets boundaries, fails, gets back up. At times, she acts with clarity; at others, out of sheer desperation. But she always maintains a desire for autonomy, for not becoming a victim or a martyr. What’s remarkable is how the film conveys all this without over-explaining or underlining, letting gestures, silences, and situations speak for themselves.

As Kika ventures deeper into this world, she also encounters other women who accompany her, challenge her, make her laugh, confront her. There is a strange kind of sisterhood born from daily friction, practical advice, and shared laughter in the face of absurdity. That network is not a savior, but it is real. And in that reality lies the film’s strength: Kika doesn’t need artifice to move us, because its gaze on the human is honest enough to strike a deep chord. The protagonist doesn’t change the world or arrive at a grand revelation about herself. But she learns to move through darkness with a bit more certainty, to live with pain without letting it consume her, to find pleasure where there was once only fear. That, perhaps, is the film’s most unexpected lesson: that sometimes, life is rebuilt from its margins—not in spite of them.