There’s a spot on the windswept island around which Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra unfolds where gas bubbles up from the sea. A pipeline has burst by the shore, and fumes have gurgled out of it since time immemorial. It’s a local miracle: people come to flick their lighters and watch the flames dance on the surface, a strange mystery in a film teeming with them. Sotomayor’s earlier features—each to various extents dredged up from childhood memories—were all similarly at the mercy of the elements. Water was a key motif in both her 2012 debut Thursday till Sunday—a chronicle of a tempestuous family road trip to the beaches of Northern Chile—and Swim to Me, a study of class frictions emanating from a wealthy Santiago home; in Too Late to Die Young, a fire ravaged a bohemian commune on the hills around the capital city just as the country embarked on its post-Pinochet era. Adapted from Pilar Quintana’s 2017 novel of the same name, La Perra heralds a departure from the autobiographical vein of the director’s previous work, but it’s just as interested in probing the relationship between people and the landscape that entombs them.
If you’ve kept abreast of her output, you’ll know the word checks out: Sotomayor likes to set her films in confined spaces that do not house so much as entrap her characters, and the ease with which she weaponizes familiar, domestic locales is a hallmark of her artistry. Much of Thursday till Sunday unspools inside a car and Too Late to Die Young around the hillside retreat; Swim to Me seldom moves outside the villa at its center. In adapting Quintana’s book, Sotomayor and co-writer Inés Bortagaray swap the original milieu—the verdant jungle around the Colombian Pacific—for an isle off the South of Chile. It is here that childless 40-something Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún) was born and raised, and though the mainland is just a short ferry ride away, it’s hard to imagine she’s ever left. As played by Oyarzún, an actress graced with the angular beauty of a Modigliani woman, she enjoys a kind of symbiotic rapport with her native turf. Like many other islanders, Silvia ekes out a living selling seaweed, and in its earliest segments—documenting the business in painstaking detail—La Perra evokes the Breton films of Jean Epstein, another cineaste who turned his maritime locales into forces capable of speaking just as vividly as the drifters who traverse them.
That tension—between the fictional foreground and nonfictional background—surfaces throughout, even after Silvia happens on the titular dog, a stray pup she decides to adopt and christen after the Mexican popstar whose 1980s hits ricochet from her rickety TV: Yuri. The incident sets the plot in motion; the mutt upends Silvia’s solitary existence, and the film, in its simplest terms, follows the aftermath of that life-changing encounter. But La Perra is not narratively driven, and it is all the stronger for its insouciant disregard for dramatic conventions. If the adoption effectively transforms Silvia—if the experience sends her on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to confront childhood traumas—this feels almost incidental to a film that stoically refuses to treat the animal as a mere catalyst for her character arc.
That’s perhaps what’s most refreshing about La Perra. Instead of turning Yuri into a trite cliché—a “best friend” summoned to fill some emotional void—Sotomayor pushes back against the very idea of domestication. It’s not just that the mutt is an unruly mess, immune to commands, and prone to run away any chance she gets; it’s that the film itself, shot by Simone D’Arcangelo—best-famed for his work with Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis—is just as unwilling to be tamed. Early on, Sotomayor abandons Silvia to follow Yuri as she roams the island, barks at horses, and feasts on bones—in splintering its perspective to sideline the woman’s and embrace the dog’s, La Perra comes close to radiating the same carefree energy of its four-legged co-star.
Even as the film, halfway through, winds back to introduce us to preteen Silvia (Rafaella Grimberg) and the tragedy that’s likely sculpted her indissoluble bond to the isle, the flashback—Sotomayor’s first ever—doesn’t behave the way you might expect. Where other films would have gone out of their way to demarcate the different periods—through distinct palettes, say, or era-specific props and decor—Sotomayor leaves hers to hang in a temporal limbo. Throughout, smartphones and present-day cars are present alongside objects from earlier decades, and the amalgam makes it difficult to tell when exactly any of it takes place. La Perra was shot on Isla Santa Maria, but the setting itself looks suspended, not a real place but a ghostly no man’s land; at its most confounding, the film suggests a world unmoored in time and space.
Sotomayor maintains a disquieting atmosphere, though not every interstitial shot of rain-soaked cliffs and empty beaches feels pregnant with meaning, and the denouement threatens to put too neat a wrap on the whole journey. But after Swim to Me, a Netflix production that forced her to curb instincts in service of a different, more legible kind of cinema, there is something exciting about a work that ships its director back into her element. “On this island, fires are lit on water,” young Silvia tells a skeptical visitor. It’s an apt metaphor for Sotomayor’s film, one that doesn’t pretend to explain its mysteries but lets you bask in them instead.
La Perra premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.