Reviews & Articles

The AICAHK website rarely runs film reviews, but this film from Argentina shown at the 2025 HKIFF, coincided with the death of Pope Francis, who was from Argentina and the election of Leo, who worked as a missionary in Peru for twenty years.

Image above: Nine-year old Anika (Anika Booz) photographed by Myriam (Mara Bestelli) in front of an animal cemetery in Iván Fund's The Message (Image: courtesy of Cineuropa magazine)

Film review

by John Batten

The Message (Spanish: El mensaje)

Director: Iván Fund 

Argentina/Spain/Uruguay, 2025, 90 minutes

****½ (4½ stars)

A deserved winner of this year’s Silver Bear Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and screened at the 2025 Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), Argentine director Iván Fund describes his film The Message (2025) as a “road movie,” He explains that, “..it is definitely a road movie, since drama is by definition a journey, someone being on the road.”

A couple, Roger and Myriam – aged approximately in their late 50s - and a nine-year old girl, Anika, travel around the Argentine’s Entre Rios countryside visiting small towns in a campervan. The film slowly unwinds amidst daily life, meals, spare conversations, and the intermittent playing of the Pet Shop Boys’ uplifting but poignant Always on My Mind. It is the gentlest of road movies; there are no long stretches of road or great revelations, and self-discovery is a week’s growing-up for Anika bracketed by two of her baby teeth falling out.

Through skillful inference and careful camera-work, we come to know more about this not-quite-family. The opening scenes, with little dialogue or explanation, set the story. A late night visit to the campervan by a man wanting Anika to talk to his pet turtle. Myriam photographing Anika beside a sign for an animal cemetery, then photographed next to a pet’s gravestone. Later, a short sequence follows Roger and Anika scrambling through a cornfield stealing ripe corn cobs, emerging with an armful back to a waiting Myriam in the campervan. Another early shot sees Myriam helping Anika wash herself in an outdoor camping-style shower, a little later we see Anika knocking repeatedly on the campervan door asking to be let in after being locked out by the couple.

From their campervan, Roger and Myriam run a clairvoyance business using Anika’s telepathic abilities with animals. Myriam is often on her phone, typing out messages and talking to clients, reporting the results of Anika’s communications with their animal, including those recently deceased. Roger multi-tasks as the van’s driver and handles all invoicing and payments. Clients seek out Anika’s services through advertisements on the Internet, social media, and local TV news reports about her abilities. Myriam is heard later explaining to a customer that being able to talk to animals is a “special ability that runs through the female members of the family.”

Anika addresses Roger and Myriam by their first names, implying that the couple are not her parents; more like guardians, perhaps. At all times the trio have a close, gentle, loving and respectful relationship with each other. However, the film conveys an undercurrent of insecurity. Anika has much free time and receives no obvious formal schooling; and, the family have little money and every successful business transaction is completed with obvious relief.

In between meeting clients and their animals, we witness the family’s circus-like wanderings and relaxed daily routines. Brief anecdotal-like scenes also add to the overall story, such as when an intrigued Anika finds a set of old photographs of a much-younger Roger dressed as a clown.  

We know more about the family during the only intentional side-trip taken by the trio to a remote countryside psychiatric facility. At the entrance, the security guard asks what is their relationship to the patient they wish to see. Myriam answers with a sideways glance at Roger (implying that her reply could be a lie, we are uncertain), “I’m her mother.”  

Inside, waiting and seated on a courtyard bench, a young woman joyfully talks with and hugs Anika, saying, “You’ve grown so big!” The scene is brief and we aren’t privy, yet, to their possible real relationship.

In an interview in the online Cineuropa magazine, Iván Fund explains that his ideas about family are similar to those of the Japanese director, Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose recent films Shoplifters (2018) and Monster (2023) are centred on ambiguous family and interpersonal relationships. Fund believes that “…what family really means is the act of being present.” He says of The Message that the audience is “never sure about (the characters’) real relationship, but their feelings are very noble and very true.” These intentional ambiguities are more intriguing by knowing the characters’ real off-screen relationships. The actors Mara Bestelli (Myriam) and Marcelo Subiotto (Roger) are partners in real life. The young Anika in the film is Anika Booz, Fund’s step-daughter and daughter of his partner Betania Cappato, who plays the woman - Anika’s presumed on-screen mother - in the psychiatric hospital.

In this slow, sensitive sketch of a family in vague – possibly temporary - states of change and personal recovery, Fund expertly develops a story, and stories, showing relationships are delicate and nuanced, rather than fixed or stereotypical. The film’s ambiguities push the viewer to appreciate the individuality of each character, and with deft direction his film is never sentimental or mushy: ensured by Anika’s accomplished poise and only brief walk-on parts for the animals that Anika communicates with.

Anika’s telepathy is a storyline that runs throughout the film, with something of the fantastic present, but her character is not defined by that special ability. Indeed, Anika appears reluctant when asked to communicate with a client’s pet. Instead, the film portrays Anika as having an endearing youthful sensitivity. Two incidents highlight this. Anika briefly meets and talks to a horse in a field, but rather than this being seen as exceptional it is shown as similar to the daily pet conversations that people have with their cats or dogs - or horses! Also, seemingly semi-daydreaming, a brief scene shows Anika casually allowing a beetle or cockroach to move over and between her fingers. Her abilities with animals, even cockroaches, appears governed by her being calm, sensitive, observant and inquisitive.  

Anika has insight of the real world and at times her own thoughts are spoken through her readings. She is asked by an owner to enquire about her cat’s “real thoughts.” Looking carefully at the imperious grey cat, Anika tells the woman that the cat has recently seen a couple and some unusual, sneaky behaviour in a back-room. The cat’s owner considers this carefully and nods knowingly. In coded language, the straight-faced Anika is referring to being locked-out and Myriam and Roger’s quick private tryst in the campervan of a few days earlier. The surprised Myriam glances at an equally surprised Roger - Anika is no naïf!

The film’s final scenes bring the film full circle. Anika confides to Myriam that at the hospital her mother had asked Anika to tell Myriam that “she loved her.” By implication, but still with a touch of doubt, Myriam is confirmed as Anika’s grand-mother. They warmly, and for Myriam emotionally, hug and hold each other. One of the film’s final scenes see the trio happily eating corncobs for dinner – thus, establishing an approximate time-line of about a week since the film’s opening scenes. The final credits roll and the song plays again, as Iván Fund explains, it is Anika’s “comfort song”: 

“…You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

Maybe I didn't treat you quite as good as I should
Maybe I didn't love you quite as often as I could
Maybe I didn't hold you all those lonely, lonely times
And I guess I never told you, I''m so happy that you're mine….”