Olmo

Fernando Eimbcke has always had a knack for taking the tiniest details of adolescence and making them resonate with a universal weight. With Olmo, his fourth feature after the acclaimed Duck Season and Club Sandwich, he once again immerses us in the fragile, bittersweet space where childhood collides with the responsibilities of adulthood. What could have been a straightforward coming-of-age story transforms, under his delicate gaze, into a layered portrait of a family on the edge of survival, and of a boy learning far too soon that freedom comes with a cost.

The film unfolds in New Mexico in 1979, where Olmo (played with striking naturalism by Aivan Uttapa) is a 14-year-old torn between the urges of adolescence and the crushing weight of family duty. His father Nestor (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) is confined to bed with multiple sclerosis, stripped of dignity but clinging to the role of patriarch, while his mother Cecilia (Andrea Suarez Paz) works endless shifts as a waitress, stretched to breaking point just to keep the family afloat. His sister Ana (Rosa Armendariz) is perpetually annoyed at the idea that her youth is being stolen by caretaking chores, preferring the fleeting escape of roller discos. Into this precarious balance slips Olmo’s own restless desire — for freedom, for independence, for his neighbor and crush Nina (Melanie Frometa).

The catalyst is almost comically trivial: Nina has invited Olmo and his best friend Miguel (Diego Olmedo) to a party, on the condition they bring a stereo. What begins as a simple teenage mission — a rite of passage wrapped in the promise of music, dancing, and maybe even romance — becomes a crucible for the family’s tensions. The stereo is broken, and in the process of trying to repair it under the impatient guidance of his father, Olmo confronts not just tangled wires but the raw reality of Nestor’s own helplessness. Their argument over circuits and connections cuts deeper than the mechanics, laying bare the resentment on both sides: a father who has lost control of his life, and a son who feels shackled by inherited responsibility.

It’s telling that the same stereo, an anniversary gift from Nestor to Cecilia, becomes both symbol and battleground. For the father, it recalls better times, a memory of autonomy and love; for the son, it is merely a tool, a ticket to enter the world of adolescence. When Olmo chooses, in a burst of frustration, to leave his father unsupervised for the night in order to attend the party, the decision feels reckless, cruel even — but it is also achingly understandable. Eimbcke and co-writer Vanesa Garnica never treat the boy’s choices with judgment; instead, they frame them as the messy, contradictory steps of someone straddling two worlds.

The film’s tone is remarkable in its balance. It recalls the awkward sincerity of Napoleon Dynamite but strips away irony, replacing it with empathy. A pee-soaked mattress, a broken car, a bedpan — in the wrong hands, these could all become elements of cringe comedy or melodrama. Yet Eimbcke approaches them with a gentle honesty, reminding us how these mundane, humiliating tasks define family life when resources and energy are scarce. Carolina Costa’s cinematography reinforces this grounded atmosphere: interiors are often dim, as if lit only by whatever daylight slips past drawn curtains, while the wide desert skies evoke both suffocation and possibility. Even the roller rink, with its pastel lights and pulsing music, feels less like an escape than a fragile illusion of freedom.

The performances breathe life into this fragile ecosystem. Aivan Uttapa carries the film with a quiet authenticity, his restless energy offset by moments of stillness where guilt and yearning coexist on his face. His chemistry with Diego Olmedo as Miguel is a small wonder — their friendship has the lived-in rhythms of boys who share everything from daydreams to Tony Manero dance routines. When they finally step onto the floor with a Saturday Night Fever-inspired performance, it’s as cringe-inducing as it is joyous, a pure snapshot of adolescence where humiliation and triumph blur. Rosa Armendariz injects fire into Ana, a teenager both furious at her circumstances and desperate to carve out a sliver of independence. Meanwhile, Gustavo Sánchez Parra imbues Nestor with heartbreaking contradictions: brittle authority, raw bitterness, but also flashes of tenderness that remind us he is still a father, even as his illness robs him of power. Andrea Suarez Paz rounds out the family with a performance that aches with exhaustion, a woman trying to mother everyone while the world keeps taking more from her.

What elevates Olmo is not its plot, which is deceptively simple, but its perspective. By keeping the camera aligned with Olmo’s point of view, Eimbcke magnifies the stakes of adolescent rituals while quietly acknowledging the darker realities of adult life in the margins. A party invitation becomes a matter of destiny; a broken stereo, a test of manhood; a missed shift, a threat of eviction. The stakes may shrink or expand depending on whose eyes we borrow, and the film’s brilliance lies in showing how both can be true at once.

Behind the intimacy of this single story is also a broader resonance. Set against the backdrop of a struggling Mexican-American family in the late 1970s, the film inevitably touches on themes of migration, cultural negotiation, and systemic neglect, even if it never foregrounds them. That choice, far from diminishing its political edge, sharpens it: Olmo does not preach, but it quietly insists that empathy for one family’s small joys and struggles can open a window to the experiences of many. The fact that the producers include Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B — the same team behind Moonlight — underscores the film’s subtle kinship with works that humanize lives too often overlooked.

Olmo is not about a stereo, or even a party. It is about a boy forced to navigate the contradictions of youth too soon: the desire to be carefree against the inescapable weight of responsibility, the thrill of first crushes against the guilt of abandoning family duty, the dream of independence shadowed by the reality of interdependence. It is about how adolescence, in its most universal form, magnifies both the absurd and the profound. And it is about how, years later, we look back at those moments — with laughter, with regret, but also with recognition that they shaped us. With Olmo, Fernando Eimbcke delivers a work both tender and piercing, a nostalgic coming-of-age tale that avoids sentimentality by embracing honesty. It is a film that lingers not because of grand revelations but because of the small, awkward, heartbreaking, and joyful truths it captures — truths that make us wince in recognition and, quietly, make us smile.

Olmo 
Directed by Fernando Eimbcke
Written by Fernando Eimbcke, Vanesa Garnica
Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Eréndira Núñez Larios, Michel Franco
Starring  Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Aivan Uttapa, Diego Olmedo, Andrea Suárez Paz, Rosa Armendariz
Cinematography : Carolina Costa
Edited by Mariana Rodríguez
Music by Giosuè Greco
Production companies : Plan B Entertainment, Teorema
Distributed by Film Constellation (United States)
Release date : 16 February 2025 (Berlinale)
Running time : 84 minutes

Seen September 9 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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