Toronto 2025 Review: FORASTERA, Going Slowly into That Good Night

Grief can manifest in a myriad of ways, and there is not necessarily any perfect or 'sensible' way to process the loss of family, even if they're of an age where it's not a surprise. And it's natural to have mixed feelings about how you might resemble a parent or grandparent, either physically or in personality. And perhaps these two seemingly different ideas, grief and resemblance, can have strange outcomes when mixed.

Spanish filmmaker Lucía Aleñar Iglesias crafts a quiet and intimate portrait of grief held very closely to the chest. Expanded from her short film, Forastera is a different kind of ghost story, one perhaps more about benevolence and longing that vengeance. It is more concerned with how we make it through those first troubling days and learn what it will take to live through the loss of love.

Cata (Zoe Stein, Manticora) and her sister are spending the summer with their grandparents Catalina and Tomeu in Mallorca. Cata is of an age where she is wanting more independence, and she and her grandmother don't always see eye to eye, often chafing with each other as abuela wants her to be a dutiful grandchild and Cata wants to spend more time with her Swedish summer love Max (Nonni Ardal Hammarström). But when her Abuela dies suddenly, her Abuelo Tomeu (Lluís Homar, Broken Embraces) is devastated, and her mother Pepa (Núria Prims) comes to look after him, at least temporarily. But there are reflections in the strain between parent and child, and Cata starts acting strangely.

The summer at first feels like a typically lazy ones for girls of Cata's age; she has no particular responsabilites, she's just old enough to have a certain freedom of movement (though smart enough not to go crazy with that). She's still not sure exactly what she wants, perhaps other than to spend time with her summer love and think about what the coming last teenage years will mean. So when she is the one to find her grandmother dead, it seems to spark something in her. Or perhaps more accurately, a spark enters into Cata.

Over some days, Cata starts showing an interest in cooking, when she would do anything to avoid it before. She tries to look after Tomeu as he goes through his deep mourning. She seems confused when Max affection, and she starts smoking her grandmother's cigarettes. She 'borrows' an old 70s dress of her grandmother's as well, wearing it as if it were her own. Teenagers often want to act older, as they want to move more quickly out of that awkward time between childhood and adulthood, but Cata seems to have slipped into this effortlessly.

But it's not just in this physical attributes that Cata seems to shift. 'Forastera' translates as 'stranger' or what might be closer to Aleñar Iglesias's ideas, 'outsider'. Is Cata trying to act like her grandmother, or is the ghost of her abuela inhabiting her? While the death was of natural causes and not violent, there is no one to blame, and there are no overwhelming unfinished tasks that need to be completed, it seems Catalina isn't quite ready to let go. Perhaps she wants to help Tomeu through these first weeks of the terrible grief; she might want to see Pepa one last time; or maybe she's taking the opportunity to be in the world just a little bit longer.

Stein is mesmerizing as the ghost-possessed Cata. She feel older not just in how she speaks to Tomeu or her sister or mother, but in her movements, exactly as if an old woman suddenly found herself in a younger body, but still can't help her older mannerisms. There is that maturity that comes with age, a confidence in your own (on in this case, someone else's) skin, more of an attitude of not caring what others think anymore, but also a desire to see certain loose ends tie up. Stein inhabits the role of the abuela in these final, gifted moments to say her goodbyes.

She wants those small moments one could have if death was known; a moment for one last reminiscence with her husband, a moment to hold her daughter, to try and patch the relationship between the daughter and father. The shift is palpable, uncanny, and on occasion, bordering on disturbing. In this enchanting location, with its vistas of the rocks and the sea, the eternity awaiting the ghost feels, not like a heaven exactly, but a next stop on a soul's journey that is unknown, and Cata is helping her grandmother prepare.

Forastera is an atypical ghost story, one that connects the generations and suggests that which might resist, a familiarity and resemblance that we could find too close might be a necessary bridge. Grief asks us to endure it so that we might understand the dead and the living better.