During the 1970s and 1980s the press popularized the term “enfant terrible” —a label popularized by Jean Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants terribles (1929)— to describe the rebellious, provocative genius. When applied to filmmakers and actors, the epithet helped create a romantic image of the creator as an exuberant, unpredictable force who stood apart from conventions.
However, that label also served to beautify and justify less admirable behaviors: arrogance, humiliations, abuses of power, and outbursts of anger. Dismantling a hotel room, assaulting journalists, or making actors cry during a shoot were presented as manifestations of a “difficult genius,” traits attributed to the “perfectionist or tormented artist.” There are ample examples: actors such as Klaus Kinski, Gérard Depardieu, or Sean Penn, and directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, or Álex de la Iglesia.
One of those old enfant terrible figures is the protagonist of The Beloved, a celebrated filmmaker with a long history of violence and excess. Facing him is one of his victims, his own daughter, an actress who works as a waitress. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s new film begins from a premise that distribution quirks make resemble the recent Sentimental Value (2025). Fortunately, there is one more important coincidence: both films are excellent.
The Beloved moves forward in two directions. On one hand, it is a father–daughter drama; on the other, a chronicle of a film shoot. The difficult reunion between father and daughter, marked by his guilt and her resentment, anchors the entire plot. From the shocking opening—a long sequence shot with hidden cameras, built on a shot/reverse-shot technique, that achieves extraordinary levels of naturalness and truth—to that game of furtive glances that runs throughout the film and crystallizes in two moments of immense dramatic force: the car scene, as the song “La noche eterna,” by Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado, plays, and the buffet scene, accompanied by Olivier Arson’s score. The score, with echoes of Georges Delerue and The Contempt (1963) (another film set around a shoot), will return at the end as a beautiful musical rhyme.
And then there is the cinema within the cinema. In the lineage of titles like Day for Night (1973), The Contempt, or the very apt Attention to That Beloved Prostitute (1971), where Fassbinder depicted a crew subjected to the tensions, whims, and abuses of a despotic director, The Beloved turns the set into a stage for power dynamics. Sorogoyen reveals the toxic dynamics that a director accustomed to having no one contradict him can generate and, in doing so, portrays a figure not often seen on screen: the artist who proclaims himself progressive and engaged while behaving as a tyrannical, egocentric, and chauvinistic dictator.
To this aspect belongs another of the film’s great sequences, on par with the famous bar scene from Beasts (2022): the repetition of a take that refuses to come out right, gradually compounding tension until it becomes nearly unbearable. Sorogoyen demonstrates here an overwhelming mastery of staging, dramatic tempo, and actor direction (Bardem and Victoria Luengo are formidable).
An extraordinary sequence that contrasts with what strikes me as the film’s most debatable aspect: the use of certain expressive devices —a blend of formats, textures, and sounds, alternating between color and black-and-white—whose purpose Sorogoyen does not quite manage to convey with sufficient clarity, ending up feeling more artificial than necessary.
Does that suffice to tarnish the whole? Not at all. The Beloved is, without doubt, one of Spain’s standout films of 2026. Another year that, as happened in 2025 (Sundays, Sirat, Pilgrimage), promises a new trio of ace titles. The only one missing is The Black Ball.
