tótem review

Carrying a familiar and formless organic momentum that meshes wonderfully with its subtext and emotional semblance that are felt through all the characters’ preoccupations and reverberations, Totem does not aim to augment its fulcrum through the delivery of emotional peaks and chasms but confidently rests somewhere in between conveyed through realism. Effortlessly balancing life and death through touching examples, one where Tona’s father grants him a bonsai tree communicating the love and loss that he cannot express in words. The plant itself symbolizes the father’s care and admiration when words are too much to bear.

Another shows Sol asking Siri on a smartphone, “When will the world end?” A heartbreaking window into the soul of a little girl who is about to lose her father and imagines her whole world is now coming to an end. Her grandfather shares the same emotional anguish but each finds their own place amongst a bustling house of family members who have all probably confronted these moments within themselves that the film so tenderly and selectively depicts.

Totem centers itself on human relationships under the weight of having no control and how we compensate for our own helplessness in the face of inevitability. It gracefully depicts culture and grief with poetic and symbolic language and is another amazing film now under Lila Aviles’s achievements that she has so expertly crafted, rewarding its viewers through their own interpretations to find a totem within this deeply textured film.