From Omeleto.
A woman attends funerals.
THE MOURNING OF is used with permission from Merced Elizondo. Learn more at https://mercedelizondo.com.
Maribel is a young woman whose beloved mother has recently passed away. Mired in a heart-wrenching grief, she has begun secretly attending the funerals and wakes of strangers, where she sits among the crowd, offers condolences and observes the sadness of others in the same position as her.
Maribel’s priest has presided over many of these occasions, and while he’s sympathetic to Maribel’s deep sorrow and heartache, he worries for Maribel. As her strange solace transforms into something altogether more unsettling, Maribel’s inability to move forward begins to catch up to her.
Directed by Merced Elizondo, this quietly devastating short drama is a portrait of grief, and the strange and circuitous journey it can sometimes guide us to take in our search for relief, understanding and acceptance. Told with a rich, hypnotic sense of storytelling, it approaches grief not as a moment to be overcome, but as a persistent shadow that lingers long after loss — a psychological underworld where emotions elude rationality, in search of an outlet or an expression.
Visually and sensorially, the storytelling is meticulous: the editing often creates rhythms of fracture and dislocation, and the cinematography and camerawork render funeral homes and church interiors as echoing, almost uncanny spaces at times. It balances a subdued, hush atmosphere with a creeping alienation, echoing Maribel’s dilemma as a character: she’s alive, but it’s as if she’s haunting her own life, searching for some sense of peace or relief from her overwhelming grief.
That grief has frozen her, psychologically, and her presence at a parade of funerals and wakes allows her to go through the motions of support for others, even as she avoids them herself. Actor Natalia Villegas’s performance anchors the film; she’s compelling with an unsettling restraint. Maribel herself is a character whose circumstances outside her recent loss are mostly opaque; she seems to have few others in her life. Instead of tearful outbursts, Villegas’s performance gestures towards a spiritual emptiness and profound loneliness. She consoles strangers and offers condolences, but with each funeral and wake, these gestures of kindness take on a more disquieting cast, serving Maribel’s psychological needs more than the unknown mourners.
As the priest quietly observing Maribel at these funerals, actor Julio Cesar Cedillo has an innate warmth and sympathy, balancing the deep empathy he feels for Maribel with his growing disapproval of her attendance at funerals of people she doesn’t know, using their grief as a way to manage her own. He calls her out on it, his frank words seemingly shaking Maribel out of the spell she’s been under. All she can do now is face up to the grief that’s still embedded deep within her.
Elegantly crafted, emotionally immersive and compassionate, THE MOURNING OF — which, as a festival winner, is eligible to compete in the Best Live Action Short category at the Academy Awards — finds Maribel achieving a catharsis of sorts, as the frozen river within her thaws and then rushes forward. Yet the film’s watchful intelligence holds: even as Maribel finally gives expression to the raw bereftness within, the narrative offers insight into the gap between public rites of mourning, with the wilder vastness of grief, pain and loss as it lodges itself within us. It recognizes with great wisdom and empathy that such hurricanes of sorrow can sometimes scarcely be contained within one human heart — and sometimes we need the arms of a community around us to bear it.
