‘Forever Your Maternal Animal’ Review: Three Costa Rican Women Are Adrift in Valentina Maurel’s Ambiguously Rousing Family Drama
Valentina Maurel's 'Forever Your Maternal Animal' follows three Costa Rican women navigating personal and familial disconnection in a story rooted in existential displacement. The film centers on Elsa, who returns home from Europe to find her younger sister Amalia living alone in a deteriorating house, while their divorced parents pursue their own paths. Drawing on poetic and dreamlike elements, the drama explores identity, autonomy, and the complexities of family dynamics.
- ▪The film is directed by French-Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel and serves as a thematic follow-up to her 2022 feature 'I Have Electric Dreams.'
- ▪Daniela Marín reprises a parent-child dynamic from the director’s previous film, now playing Elsa, a woman returning to Costa Rica after studying in Europe.
- ▪Amalia, played by newcomer Mariangel Montero, is struggling with dropping out of college, financial issues, and living alone in a vandalized family home.
- ▪Marina de Tavira and Reinaldo Amién play the sisters’ divorced parents, each navigating post-marital lives with newfound personal freedom.
- ▪The film incorporates a poem written by Maurel’s mother, which inspired the title, and a dream had by her partner as creative reference points.
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| Original publisher | IndieWire |
| Canonical URL | https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/forever-your-maternal-animal-review-valentina-maurel-1235193481/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T14:10:18.705Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T14:10:18.705Z |
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Past lives and phantasms cue a sophisticated journey into self for three Costa Rican women seemingly adrift, in one way or another, in Valentina Maurel’s “Forever Your Maternal Animal,” which cuts closer to the bone than many movies of its kind in conveying that sense of discomfiting, existential displacement, especially in a post-truth world. With a poem written by her mother, after which the film is titled, and a vision her partner had dreamed as reference points, the French-Costa Rican director fashions a work that riffs on her first feature and Locarno hit, 2022’s “I Have Electric Dreams,” a visceral two-hander between father and child (played respectively by Reinaldo Amién and Daniela Marín, both returning for similar parent-daughter dynamic), two souls drifting into a path of…
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