OKLAHOMA CITY – If I describe a film as a mystery story, I already know you’ll be thinking of murders and detectives and an increasingly taut string of clues and characters, and that’s honestly a shame, because the actual mystery genre can be rife with much bigger, bolder questions and much deeper emotion.
A mystery can be a missing person. It can be a lost memory or a forgotten past. It can even be a search for the clues and keys to an identity – even to a family – that you’ve never known.
Make no mistake, Spanish writer/director Carla Simón’s new “Romería” is a mystery story in the most generationally powerful and emotionally compelling way, investigating and unpacking a death, but not to catch a culprit, simply to fill in the gaps of a life and the stolen truths of a memory.
18-year-old Marina (a revelatory Llúcia Garcia) travels to Spain’s Galencia coast in 2004 to meet, for the first time, her father’s family.
Marina never knew her father, only that he died when she was an infant – to be followed by her mother just a few years later – and that his family has never acknowledged her existence, going as far as declaring on his death certificate that he had no children.
Welcomed with open arms by her father’s siblings and their own children, Marina starts to see cracks and inconsistencies in the details of her parents’ life together, either in the facts that she was given or in the far-removed memories of the people that were there, but it’s difficult to tell which.
And things get even murkier when she meets her father’s parents, who seem to want to her kept at arm’s length and who would rather pay for her college tuition in cash than change her father’s death certificate so that she can get a scholarship.
But while this could be the setup for a cinematic descent into dark, buried secrets and double-crosses, it’s not that kind of movie and it’s not that kind of mystery.
The answers and reveals are as purely and powerfully human as they are sadly grounded, real, and tragic.
The truths about her parents are rooted in the toughest realities of life in the 1980s, the passionate, irrational choices that threatened to drag them down and the misunderstandings and needless vilifications that have survived into Marina’s present.
Simón captures it all against the sea and the sunsets of Galencia, making sure that you can feel the same loaded weight and lingering ghosts in every new step that Marina takes retracing her parents’ lives.
It’s all gorgeously dreamy, loaded with the natural atmosphere of the coast and the ocean and regularly dipping into the digital camcorder home video footage that Marina is filming for her own memories.
As Marina, Llúcia Garcia carries every moment of the film’s two hours on her back, cutting her youthfully defiant confidence with just a hint of timid caution and fish-out-of-water nerves, but never for a moment anything but magnetic. It’s the kind of young performance that deserves breathless recognition come awards time, but that may be too subtle and too lived-in to turn attentions.
And the same can be said for Simón’s whole sprawling cast. It’s a juggling act to keep up with the crowded family and each of their dispositions and recollections of Marina’s father, and the raw, believable family tensions running amok among them are a testament to the film’s remarkable casting.
But when the pretense and the ensemble fall aside and give way to an emotionally wrenching, magical final act, the heart of “Romería” is laid bare.
It’s a mystery story in the most universal sense. The past is a mystery that we’re all trying to solve, and we all end up running headlong into the conflicting accounts and half-recalled memories of the suspects that muddy the waters.
We don’t get to just step back into the past lives that run through our blood and experience their realities for ourselves.
We all just eventually get to become stories, even if – for better and for worse – everyone will tell the story of you differently.
“Romería” screens at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art Friday, July 17th through Sunday, July 19th.
For times, tickets, and more, visit okcmoa.com.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
