Totem Review: Nuanced Portrayal of a Child Grieving

Tótem Is a Nuanced Portrayal of a Child Grieving

Sol (Naíma Sentíes), the little girl at the heart of Lila Avilés’ Tótem, is obsessed with the bugs and birds that stretch across her family’s property. She seeks them out as fellow stragglers, trapped on the edge of the action. Like them, she skulks through dusty rooms and lurches across sunbaked cement—ignored by the adults and spotlighted by the curious camera.

Tótem follows Sol and her father Napo (Juan Francisco Maldonado), who is terminally ill and celebrating what will likely be his final birthday. The details of this disease slide into obscurity, colored by our protagonist’s age-appropriate ignorance. Avilés is more concerned with the shape and sound of childhood, and across the 95 minutes (which covers one evening in the lives of this disjointed cast), she offers a nuanced take on the disparity and complication of being young in a world built to amplify grown-up problems.

Their home is rife with movement and action, stirring with human and (the aforementioned) non-human life. Avilés almost treats this setting as a challenge, desperate to find ways of exploring each character’s internality amidst the chaos. It is a testament to the filmmaker’s skill that Sol’s perspective is prized above all. Her wide-eyed curiosity pours from the screen, the mystery of the family’s inner workings reflected in her thoughtful expressions. It is in Sentíes’ deeply felt performance that Avilés unknots the film’s tangled questions: What do adults remember about being a child? What do they forget? Which of these forgotten memories can be re-accessed? Most importantly, which elements of adulthood are comprehensible to the children who wander through, haplessly avoiding the interpersonal bombs which threaten to destabilize everything?

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At one point, Napo is describing the image he sees in the seeds scattered across his crumpled bedspread: “I see the horizon. At the beach. There…where the view ends.” It is an obvious reference to his impending demise, but it is also the opposite of the film’s aesthetic sensibilities. Rather than wide-open scenery, Avilés shoots her story in a series of close-ups, with the layout of the house a labyrinth of secret dealings and shadowy corners. Answers are evasive, stretching ominously in the background, and Tótem traverses this maze through the eyes of these characters, whose vision is narrowed by an oppressive grief.

There is no established center to this setting; the center keeps moving, bouncing from room to room, with the plot eluding any definitive pattern, broken instead into pieces of blurred and brief family dynamics. Lighting designer Armando Vargas creatively manipulates the space, ensuring people’s faces are lit by infrequent shafts of sunlight springing from sporadically positioned windows, with interactions even occasionally shot through tinted glass. The effect is like we are children granted brief, distorted flashes of certainty, like adult life is something that can only be understood in a dance of shifting leaps and crawls, its logic offered and held and snatched away. At one point, we follow Sol as she wanders the hallway, sticking snails to the oil paintings that decorate the wood-paneled walls—a strange expression of childish eccentricity—before she stumbles into her grandfather administering a therapy session. She listens to his patient describe her relationship troubles, intrigue freezing her in place, confusion weighing on her shoulders as she crouches in the doorway. Sol’s feelings are incomprehensible to herself, but Tótem extends a loving empathy to her, enraptured with her bewildering layers.

It is the non-events around the event that concern Avilés, and as such the eventual party Tótem builds towards is lackluster (as these events often are), soundtracked by laughing and small talk and half-hearted reaches towards emotional connection. Eventually the party, and the film, ends on an ominous note: A steady shot of Sol staring at her father’s flickering candles; does she understand the importance of this party? Is she storing away these mental images, already half-decayed with misremembering?

Avilés’ doesn’t invade her privacy by forcing Sol to verbalize such emotion. She decides to follow this moment with a closing image of Napo’s hauntingly empty bedroom. Such a succession of images breaks from the realistic and condensed timeline of Tótem to offer a poetic expression of loss. For this girl and her family, and even Napo himself, the thing they miss is already gone, as ephemeral as the candles soon to be blown out, as slippery as the grasshoppers that leap from Sol’s grasp.

Director: Lila Avilés
Writer: Lila Avilés
Cast: Naíma Sentíes, Juan Francisco Maldonado, Montserrat Marañón, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza
Release Date: January 26, 2024

London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her on Twitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.

Tótem Is a Nuanced Portrayal of a Child Grieving