A few years back, directors Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro joined forces for what was meant to be a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The resulting short, Sycorax, felt like the meeting of two kindred spirits. Piñeiro’s ability to resuscitate the Bard’s texts and graft them onto present-day settings met with Patiño’s keen eye for the otherworldly. The story of a fictional cineaste (Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz) who roams the Azores in search of a woman to play the eponymous witch from The Tempest, Sycorax oozed both the playfulness of Piñeiro’s “Shakespeareads” and the sensual, hypnotic aura of Patiño’s Red Moon Tide or Samsara. It was that rare joint project whose two directors worked in perfect symbiosis, each playing to the other’s strengths.
Based on an original idea by Piñeiro and Patiño, through written and directed by the latter only, Ariel draws again from The Tempest and ships Muñoz back to the Azores––this time not as a director but an actress invited to the archipelago to star in the play. Which is to say that Muñoz plays herself, and in a film where everyone around her is busy impersonating other people, she saunters into it as a kind of system error. “The whole island is a theatre,” a hotel receptionist explains at the outset: each day multiple Shakespeare plays begin at dawn and end at sunset, only to start again (in Groundhog Day fashion) the next morning. So it is that Muñoz, unable to track the theatre company that lured her to the Azores, winds up brushing shoulders with local folks playing characters from Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, and the like––many in period garb, all reciting for no audience in sight. Call it the Islands of Characters in Search of an Author, to paraphrase the title of a play by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello that’s name-dropped early on.
Yet Ariel isn’t all that interested in mining the dissonance between its contemporary backdrop and the people roaming it in capes and armors. Largely because, as Muñoz’s quest shuttles her from one play to the next, the film abandons any pretense of realism to unfold in a nebulous region suspended in time and space. Patiño slowly swaps the urban locale of its earlier segments for the mist-shrouded, barren immensities of the Azores. It is here, across windswept prairies and vertiginous cliffs, that the bulk of Ariel takes place. As in Albert Serra’s Honor de Cavalleria or Bruno Dumont’s Joan of Arc diptych (2017-2019), nature swells into a continuous and majestic stage with characters and stories popping out of every corner. Ion de Sosa (the cinematographer behind The Sacred Spirit, a Locarno standout from a few years back I can’t recommend enough) turns these vistas into dreamy prosceniums; drenched in magentas and mauves, at its most hallucinating Ariel harks back to some of Raúl Ruiz’s surreal maritime yarns, like City of Pirates and Treasure Island.
Rather than facile juxtapositions of past and present, truth and fiction, Ariel is powered by questions of a more existential nature. Who are these drifters Muñoz happens into, really? Why aren’t they able to recognize themselves as actors, people playing other people? And what would happen if they were to stray from the Bard’s hallowed texts––assuming they could? It stands to reason that, of all the play’s characters, Patiño should have chosen Ariel as protagonist. In The Tempest she’s a shapeshifting spirit bound to serve the magician Prospero, who rescued her from the tree in which she was trapped by Sycorax. In this film hers is the role for which Muñoz had been invited to the Azores, but the part, she soon discovers, went to a woman who presumably reached the islands before her. She’s played by Irene Escolar, whom Muñoz correctly identifies as the scion of a family of Spanish actors: “I just saw you play in a new film by Jonas Trueba!” (She means 2022’s You Have to Come and See It). But the epiphany is lost on Escolar; like everyone else in Ariel, she can’t or won’t allow herself to exist outside of Shakespeare’s text.
Recasting fiction as a kind of straitjacket rather than mere escapism makes for an interesting proposition. But Ariel is never quite as thought-provoking as the questions it raises. Without the formal inventiveness that makes Piñeiro’s Shakespeare projects so engaging, the film gradually squanders its mysterious allure. There’s only so much traction Patiño can draw from Muñoz’s meanderings; her several chance encounters with Romeo, Hamlet, and the like wind up feeling hollow, if not outright numbing. At a certain point, the restless hopscotching between plays and their characters’ constant calls to “write [their] own destiny” stopped giving me new things to think about, and for a while I let myself be lulled by the film’s more oneiric passages: the recurrent and overlapping ocean views, the almost liturgical soundscapes (courtesy of designer Xabier Erkizia).
Ariel works best once Patiño abandons Muñoz’s quest to turn to the prehistorical landscape around her––in other words, when the film tries to speak the same language that made its predecessors so spellbinding. But works like Red Moon Tide or Samsara never trumpeted their ideas; they worked through suggestions and intimations, and were all the more revealing for that. What’s most surprising about Ariel, on second thought, is its tendency to spell out its themes, to leave little room for ambiguity. That’s something that transpires from the script as much as the images. Tellingly, Muñoz’s journey is bookended by a shot of the sea shrouded in lurid purples as it splinters and reveals another shot just beneath it, literalizing Ariel’s nesting-doll construction.
Any film starring Agustina Muñoz is a film worth seeing. So is Ariel, if only to marvel at the way in which the actress can, through the sheer power of her gaze and voice, blur the boundary between what’s real and what isn’t better than anything else at Patiño’s disposal. There’s something ineffably youthful about her timbre, suggesting a drifter with an almost preternatural receptivity to wonder and effortless ability to expose the beauty and magic of the everyday. If only the film was just as attuned to those mysteries. Originally conceived by two directors, Ariel doesn’t belong to either. It elicits neither the insouciant freedom of Piñeiro’s Shakespeareads nor the bewitching and unsettling allure of Patiño’s earlier works––a film that, much like its characters, seems in search of an author itself.
Ariel premiered at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam.