Name: The Beloved
Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Genre: Drama
Released: 2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 135 min
Cast: Javier Bardem, Vicky Luengo, Marina Foïs, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Matthews

A celebrated film director offers his grown daughter the lead in his next picture. She has spent years failing at the craft he perfected; he has spent them being forgiven for everything he broke along the way. Rodrigo Sorogoyen builds The Beloved on that single transaction, and he never lets the audience mistake it for generosity.

The director is Esteban Martínez, and Javier Bardem plays him as a man who long ago confused control with vision. The daughter is Emilia, played by Vicky Luengo, an actress whose stalled career hands her father exactly the opening he wants. Putting them back to work together is not a reconciliation. It is a negotiation over power, and the film watches the terms turn poisonous.

Two performances, one trap

Casting Bardem is the film’s first argument. He arrives with four decades of authority and a face the camera has always trusted, and Sorogoyen turns that trust against the viewer. Esteban is magnetic precisely because Bardem makes his cruelty look like conviction; you keep granting him the benefit of the doubt the people around him long ago stopped granting. Opposite him, Luengo refuses to play Emilia as a victim waiting to be rescued. She plays a professional who knows exactly what her father is and takes the job anyway, because the job is the only thing he has ever offered that she actually wants. The tension between them is transactional rather than sentimental, and far more unsettling for it.

Sorogoyen has spent his career studying people trapped inside systems that reward the worst version of themselves: the political machine of El Reino, the riot squad of Antidisturbios, the rural siege of The Beasts. Working again with his longtime writing partner Isabel Peña, he moves the system indoors, onto a film set, where the abuser is also the author of everyone else’s role. It is his most self-implicating premise so far, a film about a director who bends everyone around him, made by a director whose own authority over a cast is close to absolute.

A set as a weapon

The picture Esteban is shooting is a period drama staged in a desert, and Sorogoyen films long stretches of The Beloved as the mechanics of moviemaking itself: the waiting, the rehearsals, the small humiliations a director can administer without ever raising his voice. The opening reunion does most of the heavy lifting. In a single extended sequence, father and daughter meet after more than a decade apart and negotiate the terms of the job, and by the time it ends the rules of the whole relationship are set. Every later scene then reads as a move in a game whose stakes only the two of them fully understand.

That self-awareness is also the film’s commercial bet. A Spanish-language drama with no genre hook sells on two things: a director whose recent work has traveled well beyond Spain, and a star whose name still opens an art-house release almost anywhere. Movistar Plus+, which co-produced, is assembling a slate meant to compete with the streaming platforms on prestige rather than volume, and The Beloved is exactly the kind of title that justifies the approach, from festival launch to theatrical run to a lead performance critics will keep arguing about.

What the film does not do is pretend its subject is new. The monstrous auteur who wounds the people who love him is one of cinema’s most rehearsed self-portraits, and The Beloved cannot fully escape the flattery buried inside the archetype, the quiet suggestion that genius earns its wreckage. Cannes gave Bardem a long standing ovation and then handed the Palme d’Or to someone else, which is its own verdict: the performance is undeniable, the film around it slightly less so. The reviews have been strong without being unanimous, and the reservation is consistent. The closer Sorogoyen gets to the machinery of filmmaking, the more the drama risks admiring the very control it means to indict.

Javier Bardem in a scene from The Beloved directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen — Javier Bardem in *The Beloved* (2026)

Alongside Bardem and Luengo, the cast includes Marina Foïs, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Matthews and Laura Birn. Sorogoyen directs from a screenplay he wrote with Peña, produced by Caballo Films and Movistar Plus+ with France’s Le Pacte, a Spanish-French co-production built for a festival launch and an international rollout. It runs a taut 135 minutes, and it played in competition on the Croisette.

The Beloved is already in French cinemas through Le Pacte, and it opens in Spain on August 26, 2026 via A Contracorriente Films, with Curzon handling a later release across the United Kingdom and Ireland; a United States date has not been set. Sorogoyen has finally made the film he has been circling his whole career, a study of the artist as the most dangerous person in the room. It is his most uncomfortable work, and, on the evidence of that reunion scene alone, close to his best.