La perra (2026), by Dominga Sotomayor

Can an animal be the vessel for everything a person didn’t know how, or wasn’t able, to process? La perra, the new film by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, never asks these questions out loud. But it thinks them in every scene, and that is what makes it more than just an interesting work.

Sotomayor’s cinema has always been a cinema of the unspoken. Her films work with the surface of things — everyday gestures, silences between people who know each other too well, landscapes that function not as backdrop but as mood — to reveal what lives underneath. In La perra, that mechanism reaches a notable maturity. The relationship between a woman and the puppy she adopts almost on impulse is not a love story between human and animal. It is an exploration of the need to protect, and of what happens when that need has no clear origin or certain destination. The question that runs through the entire film, though never stated, is how much of what we call affection is really a form of control, and how much of that control is really fear.

There is an idea that La perra develops exceptionally well: that trauma is not overcome, it is relocated. That a person can build a functional life, even a quiet one, while carrying something inside that has not yet finished happening. The past in this film does not burst in dramatically but returns through the cracks, triggered by the unexpected. The disappearance of a dog can unearth the disappearance of a child. The fear of losing something small can be the echo of a loss that was never fully processed. Sotomayor understands that this is how grief actually works: not in a linear or orderly way, but like a tide that rises and falls and sometimes covers things we thought were safe.

It is also a film about the illusion of reciprocity. One of its boldest gestures is its refusal to turn the animal into a comfortable metaphor for unconditional loyalty. Yuri is not loyal in the way dogs are loyal in movies. He has his own logic, his own instincts, his own way of relating to the world that does not pass through human expectations. And that, rather than being a narrative disappointment, is a statement of intent. The film asks whether we are capable of loving something on its own terms, without turning it into a mirror of our own needs. The answer, at least for Silvia, is not a simple one.

Sotomayor makes her Cannes debut with a work that confirms her place among the most rigorous directors in contemporary Latin American cinema. What distinguishes her filmmaking is not only formal precision but a way of looking at characters that refuses easy judgment. Her protagonists are neither victims nor heroes. They are people who carry things, and carry them imperfectly, sometimes clumsily, always recognizably. In that sense, La perra is also a reflection on guilt — not the spectacular guilt of great tragedies, but that other, more everyday and harder-to-name guilt: the guilt of having been present and not having acted, of not knowing whether what you did or didn’t do changed anything, of living with a question that has no verifiable answer. That kind of guilt is not confessed or absolved. It is carried.

La perra creates the conditions for certain questions to be felt with an unusual clarity. Leaving this film without knowing exactly what to think is not a limitation: it is the point. The unease it leaves behind is productive — the kind that demands you keep thinking long after the credits have rolled.