Ok, It's Fine

Gabriela Ivette Sandoval Torres's 2020 Mexican film opens on a man doing nothing. Six years have passed since Mariano left film school; he is nearing thirty, still lives with his mother, spends his days watching films and has never written a single screenplay. That entirely comfortable arrangement is disrupted when his fifteen-year-old cousin Ramiro moves in. The film takes on the distance between claiming to be creative and producing nothing with unsparing humour, and the presence of the younger cousin makes plain how empty the stories Mariano tells himself are. The scale is small and everything rests on character; there are no large events. It belongs to the low-budget comic strand of Mexican independent cinema. Who it's for: viewers who like character comedy and films that laugh at cinema itself. Who it's not for: anyone wanting plot and a clear line of development; how much Mariano changes is open to argument.