TIFF24 REVIEW: Los Tortuga [The Exiles] [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 110 minutes
Release Date: 2025 (Spain)
Director(s): Belén Funes
Writer(s): Marçal Cebrian & Belén Funes

Everything’s a lost cause.

Spending summer in Jaén to harvest the olive trees her father left her in his will, Anabel (Elvira Lara) is working through her emotions with family to cope. Her aunt Inés (Mamen Camacho), the deceased’s sister, does her best to help by bringing her niece into their spiritual traditions to keep his memory alive. Anabel takes to this practice of acknowledging his loss—something her Chilean mother (Antonia Zegers’ Delia) cannot. When the latter arrives to take her daughter back to Barcelon at the start of her new college semester, she struggles with their desire to not let go. Delia is still angry and trying to keep a roof over their heads. It’s easier to just pretend he never existed than to constantly feel his absence.

The Exiles focuses on this disparity between mother and daughter. Directed by Belén Funes and co-written with Marçal Cebrian, it takes us back to the city to experience the avoidance at play. We move from a very loving and caring environment in Jaén with Inés and the extended family to a cold, emotionally stunted apartment in Barcelona where the two barely see each other let alone talk. Most nights keep Delia sleeping in her taxi cab—as much a business maneuver to be on-site for more fares as it is an excuse to get away from her husband’s ghost. Anabel tries to live her life with school and friends, but it’s impossible to ignore her mother’s anguish. Something must give.

So, when they receive an eviction notice and discover every potential landing spot requires two paychecks as proof of financial stability, Delia is left not knowing what to do. Anabel tells her mom to sell her cab and get a different job so they can afford to move. Delia tells her daughter to sell the olive trees for the same reason. Add college tuition to the mix and the right thing to do becomes murky in the sense that it starts seeming like the present cannot survive unless the past is left to die. The only way forward is to confront their sorrow and move together. To speak aloud that he’s gone and not coming back. Their next chapter cannot begin with it.

This is a deeply felt drama that doesn’t shy away from their individual and shared pain. We can see how much they love each other, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. Both are too headstrong to share what they’re feeling and end up showing it via temperamental acts of impulsive rage. Yes, they ultimately show contrition, but it’s hard to accept when this cycle keeps repeating itself. So, they fight. They leave. They pretend with others like everything is okay. And then Delia’s dementia-riddled mother jumps on Skype asking about her husband because no one has told her he died. You can understand the desire to not want to keep reliving that moment, but saying it once might bring some closure.

Both Lara and Zegers are wonderful. Their performances are lived in and complementary. So often we see them looking at each other from across the room with a sweet smile that they can’t quite seem to maintain once they’re thrust into a conversation together that inevitably devolves into argument. That’s what happens when you refuse to tackle something as devastating as grief head-on. Everything you want to say gets caught in your throat because you don’t want to make things worse than they already are. You can’t therefore blame Anabel for opening up to Inés. Jaén becomes a safe place devoid of judgment while Barcelona starts feeling like a prison devoid of escape.

The Exiles is able to focus on this struggle of place and identity by keeping the narrative itself simple: life is no longer affording Delia and Anabel the room to avoid their truth. The former can’t keep distracting herself from her emotions by worrying about their money issues and the latter can’t keep ignoring their money issues to work on her emotions. In a perfect world, the two would have pressed pause on one to deal with the other, but this death was too sudden to allow for rational thinking and now they’re too far removed from it to admit where they went wrong until the choice is taken out of their hands. As long as they stick together, though, they can endure.