My Dearest Señorita

The Body as a Question Mark

I kept waiting for the film to tell me what Adela was feeling. That’s the wrong way to put it—I knew what she was feeling, or at least I thought I did. The quiet devastation in her eyes when the doctor delivered the news, the way her fingers lingered on the hospital gown as if testing its weight against her own skin.

What I couldn’t figure out was why the camera seemed so reluctant to move closer. My Dearest Señorita is a film that watches its protagonist like a stranger might watch someone through a café window: with curiosity, even tenderness, but from a distance that feels deliberate, almost clinical. And then, in one scene, it lets you in.

Adela (Elisabeth Martínez) sits on the edge of her bed in her childhood home in Pamplona, the same house where she’s lived since she was a girl, the same house where her family still calls her by a name she no longer recognizes. The walls are a pale, sickly yellow, the kind of color that looks warm in daylight but turns oppressive under the glow of a single bedside lamp. She’s holding a letter—no, not a letter, a medical report—and her hands are shaking, just slightly, the way hands do when they’re trying not to.

The camera doesn’t cut away. It doesn’t offer a close-up of her face, doesn’t zoom in on the paper trembling between her fingers. It just stays there, a medium shot, patient and unyielding, as if daring the audience to look away first.

That’s the film in a nutshell: a story about a woman learning she’s intersex, not through some grand revelation or dramatic breakdown, but through the slow, grinding work of living inside a body that has suddenly become a question mark. Fernando González Molina, the director, has said in interviews that he wanted to avoid the “trauma porn” often associated with stories about marginalized identities.

Fair enough. But what he’s made instead is something riskier—a film that refuses to perform its own empathy. It doesn’t ask you to weep for Adela.

It asks you to sit with her discomfort, to feel the weight of her silence, and to wonder, as she does, what it means to be seen when the person doing the seeing doesn’t even know what they’re looking at.

There’s a moment early on, before Adela learns the truth about herself, when she attends a family gathering. The scene is shot in a single, unbroken take, the camera gliding through the room like an uninvited guest. The relatives talk over one another, their voices a cacophony of small-town gossip and well-meaning but suffocating concern. “When are you going to settle down?” “You’re not getting any younger.” “Have you met so-and-so’s son?” Adela moves through the crowd like a ghost, her smile fixed, her responses polite but noncommittal.

The camera follows her, but it doesn’t linger on her face. Instead, it watches the way her body tenses when someone touches her shoulder, the way her eyes flick toward the door as if calculating an escape route. It’s a masterclass in physical acting, and Martínez—an intersex newcomer making her screen debut—does it all without saying a word.