A Chilean film about the events after a trans woman's partner dies, told from her perspective, this is a film that grows on you as it goes along. Some of the early scene-setting material (in particular the death of the partner) is a little clunky - we're kept a little at a distance from Marina as she experiences the loss. But the events afterwards - as she experiences small indignities and larger ones from both the family of her lover and from the police - start to expand the character as we see that stoic facade stretched further and further, as her desire to assert herself and her love for him become more and more apparent.
Daniel Vega is in pretty much every shot, and she's a fascinating performer. Not the purely perfect victim, she's a complicated, angry, possibly even sullen woman, trying to retain her dignity in circumstances that make that almost impossible .There's moments of beauty to go with the moments of pain, and the relationship she had with the deceased is not purely romanticised - there's a sense of a lot of history that's gone on here, not all of it quite as clean as we might hope. It's a tale of survival in rough emotional circumstances and about taking solace where you can, and about asserting yourself in a place that may not welcome you.
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