Mi Bestia

Mi Bestia

Still from Mi Bestia (2024)
Oldenburg Film Festival

VERDICT: Religious rumours combine with a blood moon eclipse and a girl’s journey to womanhood in this beguiling coming-of-ager with fantasy elements from Camila Beltran.

The setting of Mi Bestia is a 1996 Bogota steeped in spiritual fervour.

The coming of a blood moon eclipse on the 6th of June – 06/06/96 – has prompted people to forecast the coming of the devil and the populace has been whipped up as a result. Against the backdrop of this existing social tumult, Camila Beltran’s strange and sumptuous film presents the maelstrom inside 13-year-old Mila (Stella Martinez) who is taking the first steps into womanhood and finds the changes in her body entangling with prophecies of the end times. After its world premiere at Acid Cannes earlier this year, Mi Bestia now travels to Oldenburg Film Festival.

The entwinement of a female coming-of-age and the birth of emergence of something terrible is hardly a new phenomenon. Monstrous femininity is a familiar trope that has been used in horror films in particular for years. Beltran’s film adopts it in quite a similar way to something like Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes, though to different ends. In Eu’s film, the protagonist’s bestial transformation went hand-in-hand with a striving for agency. In Beltran’s, while the same could be said, it is much more interested in its monstrosity as a reaction against a certain type of male gaze – and overfamiliarity – that come with Mila’s onsetting adolescence.

Beltran and her cinematographer, Sylvain Verdet, do a fantastic job of placing the audience very much within Mila’s perspective. There are lots of extreme close-ups and strangely cropped compositions that mimic her attention and what comes across as a heightened sense of physical awareness. Mila is largely silent, and it is the embodiment of her focus in the cinematography that guide us to what is happening for her internally. They also use a striking technique in which frame rates are slowed creating a woozy effect. It is not used all the time, but it centres the nature of certain sequences within Mila’s body. This makes it all the more affecting when, for instance, her mother’s boyfriend, David (Hector Sanchez), stares at her legs for a split-second too long, or men on the street crane their necks to watch her walk by.

It’s not that Mila is unreceptive to tall looks, as we see her share furtive glances with her crush, Miguel Angel (Felipe Ramirez). However, it is arguably the onset of her own burgeoning sexuality that makes her aware of it in others. News stories hint at a predator making young girls disappear in the city and Mila’s understanding of both consensual sex and sexual violence is developed far closer to home. Combined with her mother’s (Marcela Mar) absence through a busy work life and closeness to and influence of their maid, Dora (Mallely Aleyda Murillo Rivas), Mila’s transformation becomes far more than just one into womanhood.

The exact nature of Mila’s transformation remains ambiguous for most of the runtime and the dreamlike visuals of certain sequences heighten the blurring of lines between reality and fantasy. Are the threats that Mila suspects actually genuine? Are the more overtly outlandish physical changes she hides away actually happening? Are the disappearing girls related in any way to the coming of the archfiend? It’s true that there are certain moments in which a little more clarity about what is supposed to be happening might make Mi Bestia all the more powerful. The suggestions and strangeness work well, but something a little more concrete might crystalise some of the themes more acutely.

That said, the confusion and fear of a young woman getting her first period are brilliantly conveyed here through the uncertainty of the surrounding atmosphere. Although Beltran is not for the most part interested in making things explicit – although the final leans more literally into the fantastical element – it could be argued this elevates rather than diminishes the potency of this mesmerising, unnerving portrait.

Director: Camila Beltran
Screenplay: Camila Beltran, Silvina Schnicer
Cast: Stella Martinez, Mallerly Murillo, Marcela Mar, Hector Sanchez
Cinematography: Sylvain Verdet
Editing: Jeanne Oberson
Sound: Edgar Imbault, Damien Tronchot
Music: Wissam Hojeij
Production company: Felina Films (Colombia), Grand Huit Films (France)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In Spanish
75 minutes