ASHES Review

We are continuing our second day at Cannes with Ashes, and we left the theater with the particular tiredness that comes not from a bad film exactly but from a film that asks you to do most of the work yourself and then does not give you enough to work with. Diego Luna's fourth feature as director is an intimate, well-intentioned portrait of a young Mexican woman navigating immigrant life between Madrid and Barcelona, based on an acclaimed novel by Brenda Navarro. The source material has the ring of something rich and specific and true. The film has the ring of something that got lost somewhere between the page and the screen.

Lucila, played by Anna Díaz with a quiet tenacity that is the film's single greatest asset, arrives in Spain to join her mother and ends up shouldering everything her mother left behind: a difficult younger brother, a series of caregiving jobs she hides from her boyfriend, a loneliness she cannot quite name. The story has the bones of something genuinely moving. A young woman who keeps showing up for everyone who has never quite shown up for her. A family held together by obligation rather than love, and the moment she finally lets herself grieve both the people she has lost and the version of herself she gave away to look after them.

Anna Díaz carries this film on her back, scene after scene, without a single false note. She deserved a tighter screenplay around her and did not get one.

The problem is not the story. It is the film's relationship to its own story, which is distant and fragmented in ways that feel less like a deliberate formal choice and more like something that happened in the edit. Whiteouts punctuate location changes with a clunkiness that interrupts rather than deepens. The timeline blurs not in the evocative way of memory but in the frustrating way of unclear storytelling. We spent the first third of the film working out who these people are to each other, which is time we should have been spending feeling something about them.

The themes that the novel apparently explored with texture and specificity, the stigma Mexican immigrants face in Spain, the economic and social forces driving people to leave, the way abandonment travels down generations like a inheritance nobody asked for, surface only briefly and then recede. A nightmare employer. A flyer for a Catalan language course. A gang terrorizing a neighborhood at night. These feel like notes toward a film rather than the film itself.

The most alive moments are the smallest ones: Lucila laughing on a bed with a happy baby, tenderly bathing an old woman no one else is looking after. In these scenes the film remembers what it is about.

The final stretch, when Lucila returns to Mexico City to mourn with her grandparents and smuggles a loved one's ashes home in her backpack, is the film's most emotionally coherent section. Here, briefly, Ashes finds the warmth and specificity it has been reaching for all along. Her grandfather's gruff tenderness. Her grandmother's refusal to soften the truth. These scenes carry real weight, and they make us feel, more than anything else in the film, what it might have been if Luna had trusted the material enough to slow down and stay inside it.

Five films into Cannes 2026, our second day ends with a shrug rather than the second green we were hoping to find after Nagi Notes opened the afternoon so beautifully. Ashes is not a failure so much as an incompletion, a film that mistakes restraint for depth and ellipsis for poetry.

Díaz deserves better. So does Navarro's novel.

🍿 SCORE = 46/100