Reinas
“Ostensibly about a deadbeat dad trying to get to know his daughters, it’s the relationships between women in Reinas that provide the most satisfying conclusions.”
Title: Reinas (2024)
Director: Klaudia Reynicke 👩🏽🇵🇪🇨🇭
Writers: Klaudia Reynicke 👩🏽🇵🇪🇨🇭 and Diego Vega 👨🏽🇵🇪
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.75/5
Set in 1990s Peru, Reinas takes viewers into a period of unrest and soaring inflation. The drama, which just had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival earlier this week, is told through the perspective of a family in Lima making the impossible decision of whether or not to stay in their homeland, or to leave everything they know to chase a potential opportunity in America.
The story reflects the childhood of writer-director Klaudia Reynicke, who left Lima at the age of 10. Visually, Reinas uses nostalgic shots of sunlit neighborhoods, local beaches, and roadside restaurants that paint a vivid picture of yesteryear. But Reynicke doesn’t shy away from the darker parts of this history, either: As easily as we see 16-year-old Aurora (Luana Vega Sousa) and her younger sister Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic) laugh in the backseat of a freewheeling truck, a pervasive sense of danger looms with adults holding tense conversations about curfews, or through the stark, massive blood stain being scrubbed at their dad Carlos’ (Gonzalo Molina) workplace, where someone had just been shot by the authoritarian police.
This window into Lima’s history offers a snapshot of various crossroads: between childhood innocence and jaded adulthood; the uncertainty of social unrest; the holding of one’s breath before emigrating; and the angsty reconciliation between an estranged couple, both trying to do what’s best for their kids but disagreeing on the method. Reynicke and co-writer Diego Vega avoid easy answers, posing modest questions back to the viewer: How does it feel to live surrounded by chaos and fear? Would you stay or would you go? It’s a narrow, but effectively tidy scope that acts as a capsule into the past, grounded by resonant family dynamics. Reinas doesn’t swing for much more than that, though, and its humble aims keep it from having more staying power.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
As hinted by its title, Reinas (or “queens”) follows primarily women in this female-directed film. The main story arc is ostensibly about a deadbeat dad trying to get to know his daughters, but it’s the relationships between women in this matriarchal Latin American family that provide the most satisfying emotional conclusions. Abuela (Susi Sánchez), mom Elena (Jimena Lindo), and daughters Aurora and Lucia each hold grievances and immense love for one another. These complicated bonds feel true to life, palpable in Aurora’s deft manipulations between her at-odds parents and with her younger sister, as well as in her teenage mistakes. Lucia, too, is easy to know on a gut level—a good kid who wants to make her parents happy, but who’s willing to keep some of her big sister’s secrets if it’ll give her perks. All the while, Elena and Abuela demonstrate spines of steel, able to hold down the fort as Carlos, the most unknowable of them all, floats through their lives, never reliable but still a loving father in his own, insufficient way.
Race: 5/5
With Reynicke’s own background as a Peruvian émigré raised in Switzerland and the United States, and with Peruvian and Barcelona-based Vega’s additional perspective, the screenwriters shed light on global events that aren’t often covered in movies or TV shows. By using familiar proxies, of adolescents (and parents) in the midst of growing pains, viewers not only see what happened to Lima residents in 1992 but feel it on a gut level. Such is the power of filmmaking, when blistering inflation can turn from cold headlines into gut wrenching scenes of family and homeland separation. With Peruvian filmmakers behind the wheel who lived through these exact events, audiences are lucky to pull back the curtain and experience even just a shade of the same euphoric love, twisted up in bittersweet disappointment, for a country with so much beauty and just as much darkness in its living memory.
Mediaversity Grade: A- 4.58/5
Reinas strives to tell a specific and authentic story and succeeds at hitting its target. Though it’s careful, curious approach keeps it from sweeping audiences off their feet, there are much worse ways to spend your time than getting to know a group of people (and their dysfunctions) intimately, and seeing the results of political and economic strife on the individual level.
Like Reinas? Try these other titles with Latina matriarchs.
One Day at a Time
Roma (2018)
Coco (2017)