Flies: a lonely retiree and 9-year-old boy find kinship in this charmingly downbeat comedy
Fernando Eimbcke’s sharp eye for composition captures the restless present tense of childhood in a bittersweet film about a young boy in Mexico City trying to make sense of his mother’s illness.
Reviewed from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival
The opening scenes of Fernando Eimbcke’s latest film – a lone woman in a flat, grumbling over a fly and neighbour noise – might suggest a series of deadpan black-out sketches to follow. But the Mexico City-set Flies settles instead into a sharply observed portrait of family and connection, wherein the comedy can suddenly sigh with a bittersweet sense of loss.
Harried Olga (Teresita Sánchez) soon takes on a renter in her cozy duplex, Tulio (Hugo Ramírez), who in turn smuggles in his nine-year-old son, Cristian (Bastian Escobar). Father and son, clearly and touchingly close, are waiting for news about mum, who is a patient in the nearby hospital. Cristian’s coping with this period is the long and short of Eimbcke’s story, but every tableau, thanks to his customary eye for composition, tells a story, and it’s suffused in the restless present tense of childhood.
The director of, most recently, Olmo (2025) and, most famously, Duck Season (2013) has always shot with the immediacy and colour sense of an illustrator or comic-book artist and with an unforced Chaplin-esque knack for gesture and scenario. When Cristian starts sneaking out to infiltrate the hospital, every foray beads together comic moments and encounters, with a street salesman or a guard. There’s genuine charm to how he gets into the good graces of the admissions clerks.
Filming in a black-and-white that echoes the storytelling simplicity, Eimbcke likewise doesn’t spend time explaining why Cristian’s father seems to go missing for long periods of time. The film (co-written by Eimbcke and Vanesa Garnica and shot by Maria Secco)) instead delves into the evolving rapport between Cristian and Olga. He works through his understanding of people’s needs (at once opportunistic and naive), while she warms up from her initial landlording over father and son (which saw her presenting the boy with a half-eaten banana that he had – in a hilariously perfect detail – disposed of between the bed and the wall).
Finding an arcade game nearby that resembles Space Invaders, Cristian fixates, channeling his welter of emotion about his parents into zapping away at rows of monsters. Speaking as a former pint-sized arcade addict, there’s more than a soupcon of truth to this psychological dynamic (and the game theme song, by Mexican music producer Camilo Lara, will not soon leave your brain). By simply showing Cristian and Olga reacting to similar challenges and seeing one another afresh, Eimbcke delivers a humbly poignant film that affirms his lineage with the great children’s auteurs like Lamorisse and Truffaut.