Sundance 2025 Review: RAINS OVER BABEL, Singularly Enthralling Retro-Futuristic Queer Fantasy

In the retro-futuristic, pop-punk imagination of Spanish Columbian writer-director Gala del Sol (Natalia Hermida) and her unmissable, queer-coded feature-length debut, Rains Over Babel (Llueve Sobre Babel), Cali, Colombia exists in a sublime liminal space, at the crossroads between the real and the fantastical, the natural and the supernatural, and the material (body) and the immaterial (soul). There’s nothing like Rains Over Babel and chances are, nothing like Rains Over Babel will follow it, at least not anytime soon. 

 

Rains Over Babel centers on the “Babel” of the title, a nightclub bar that doubles as the nexus for del Sol’s ambitiously ambiguous version of Purgatory-on-Earth. Nominally owned and operated by Gian Salai (John Alex Castillo), the nightclub hosts all manner of natural and supernatural events, including literal life-or-death games of chance run by La Flaca (Saray Rebolledo), a long-limbed, trickster-inspired personification of Death.

 

Gamers use all or part of their lives as hard currency, the former in yearly increments. Losers can also trade decades of servitude to La Flaca for a chance to “win” additional time for themselves or their loved ones on Earth.   

 

Intermittently narrated by Babel’s enigmatic bartender, El Boticario (Santiago Pineda), and his mute partner, Erato (Sofia Buenaventura), the latter via voiceover only the audience can hear, Rains Over Babel initially unfolds at a leisurely, even languid pace, casually introducing the main players, including Dante (Felipe Aguilar Rodríguez), a debt collector and sometime enforcer for La Flaca;  Timbí (Jose Mojica), Gian’s slacker son tasked with a narrative-changing life-or-life-after-death task; Uma (Celina Biurrun), a gambler desperate to beat La Flaca and save her terminally ill daughter; Jacob (William Hurtado), the cross-dressing son of a homophobic Evangelical preacher; and Monet (Johan Zapata), a hedonistic, dead-by-overdose poet obsessed with getting another chance at life.

 

And that’s only a macro-level view of Rains Over Babel’s prodigious character count. Others, some of minor significance, some of potentially major import, exit the narrative moments after entering, leaving hints and clues about their importance to the film, its overarching themes, the central characters, and their respective arcs involving the ever constant, roiling conflicts between tradition and (post) modernity, hierarchies of repression and self-expression, rigid, inflexible dogma and inclusive, judgement-free openness, and the essential, life-affirming primacy of art (visual, aural, and otherwise) over mortality and its discontents. 

 

Where the first half of Rains Over Babel unhurriedly introduces the key characters and their messy, conflict-ridden lives, the more frenetic, energetic second half turns on Timbí and Uma’s frantic, comical search for a missing musician, El Callegüeso (Jacobo Velez), through Cali’s surreal nightlife. If Timbí doesn’t find the wayward singer and bring him back to perform at Babel before midnight, his father will likely lose his life to non-supernatural debt collectors. Uma hopes to get one more chance to win her daughter’s life from La Flaca before the clock strikes midnight while Dante, gradually remembering his earlier, pre-purgatorial life and a renewed sense of purpose, finds and possibly loses a long-lost lover. 

 

Del Sol cites Dante’s Inferno as a central influence, albeit a broad, barely recognizable one, but the influences don’t start and stop there. As Rains Over Babel unfolds onscreen, other influences come to mind, including Jean Cocteau’s masterworks of poetic surrealism, The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus and The Testament of Orpheus, Powell & Pressburger’s lyrical exploration of life-after-death, A Matter of Life and Death, and Wim Wenders’s romantic fantasy of estrangement and reconciliation, Wings of Desire.  

 

Nothing in the preceding description, though, comes close to capturing the spectacular visuals del Sol and her talented team of collaborators deliver on a presumably modest budget. Rains Over Babel bursts from the four corners of the screen with riotous, neon-tinged color, extravagantly outrageous costumes, and animated, dynamic camerawork.

 

Add to that an incredibly exuberant musical performance at the climax and Rains Over Babel delivers a singularly gripping experience, especially during the second half where del Sol’s vision of Cali-as-Purgatory comes to tangible fruition.