The Lighthouse of the Orcas

Lola's son Tristán is autistic and responds to nothing. One day, watching footage of a park ranger who works with killer whales in Patagonia, the boy looks at the screen for the first time. Lola takes it as a sign and travels from Spain to Argentina, to the Valdés Peninsula. Beto, the ranger, does not want them there. Gerardo Olivares directs. Maribel Verdú plays Lola and Joaquín Furriel plays Beto. The source is real. Roberto Bubas worked for years as a ranger on the Valdés Peninsula and wrote a book about his relationship with the killer whales, on which the film is based. The idea at the centre is contact, not a promise of cure. Tristán does not get better near the whales; he responds to something, and that is what changes for his mother. It was shot on location. On the shore at Punta Norte the killer whales hunt by throwing themselves onto the beach, a behaviour seen in only a few places in the world, and the film uses the sight of it. The weakness is the script. The romantic line between the mother and the ranger is predictable, and the treatment of autism slides at times into something too optimistic. Who it is for: viewers who like emotional drama set in nature and true story adaptations. Who it is not for: the melodrama runs high, the resolution comes too easily, and tying autism to a miracle story is contestable.