When death crashes the party

Totem is a tender, gentle exploration of the limbo between life and death and the anticipatory grief that accompanies it.

Naima Senties in a scene from Totem. Supplied

Let’s start at the end: the Mexican drama Totem has one of the finest final scenes I have seen. It centres on the main character, seven-year-old Sol (Naima Senties), and it is mesmerising, beautiful, sad and hopeful all at once.

This movie, written and directed by Lila Aviles, unfolds over a single day and is full of life. Sol is at her grandfather’s. It’s a middle class household with a dog, cat, parrot and goldfish. The bathroom is full of plants that attract snails and insects.

Sol is there, however, because her artist father (Mateo Garcia Elizondo) is dying of cancer. It’s his birthday and family and friends have gathered for what amounts to a wake for a man who is not yet dead.

The women, including Sol’s mother (Iazua Larios) and aunts, take charge of the preparations. They hold it together, doing what is needed so the party can happen, aware but defiant of the fact death is an uninvited guest. They bond and they bicker, as families do.

Sol is a precocious child. She knows her father is in the same room in which his mother, her grandmother, died, also of cancer. She asks an AI app when the world will end and “if my dad is going to die”.

Her father, a young man, initially refuses to leave that room in his parent’s house. In his high school years, as a friend jokes later, he was so handsome he won the “Miss Universe for guys”.

Now he is wearing diapers and feels ashamed. A scene where he showers is heart-wrenching. As is an exchange between his relatives about the cost of keeping him alive.

It’s clear that Sol’s mother and father are not together. When he does let them into the room, what happens is one of the most achingly beautiful moments in an intimate movie that is full of them.

This is the director’s second feature, following The Chambermaid (2018). Totem was Mexico’s nomination for the 2024 Oscars. It is a tender, gentle exploration of the limbo between life and death and the anticipatory grief that accompanies it.

The centrepiece of the party is a homemade birthday cake. On the first attempt, it is burned. “We can make another one,’’ Sol says. The second cake is in the aforementioned final scene and it’s a cinematic slice of life that will never leave my mind.