Our Mothers

Cesar Diaz’s debut feature is both compact and ambitious, distilling its larger themes into the core story of one young man and his secretive mother.

Our Mothers (which won the Caméra d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is available to watch on demand beginning May 1) is the sort of movie that gets lost in the U.S. when life is normal. It’s a good one to see when you’re anxious, in pain, hypersensitized, uncertain of the ground beneath you, and thinking — maybe for the first time — that you ought to start digging.

Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing.

Diaz wears his heart on his sleeve and elicits affecting performances from his cast, but his portrait of a country in turmoil feels incomplete.

Notwithstanding a few genuinely affecting moments, Our Mothers never breaks free from being a standard social-issue movie mostly invested in preaching the cause.

Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.

Clearly Diaz wanted to make a sotto-voce exploration of a difficult and heavy topic — instead of a histrionic melodrama — but in trying to rein in the emotions, he seems to have practically scrubbed them out completely. The screenplay, also by Diaz, is so predictable that most of the characters simply seem to be going through the motions, with audiences remaining at an arm’s length even during the supposedly cathartic final moments.