“One of the most impressive debuts of the year.”

“You look just like her.” Most people will have heard this phrase or something similar while being compared to a relative. Sometimes this relative is no longer alive. How does it affect you when you are compared to a dead person, especially one that was close to you? This is the nucleus of Spanish director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ debut feature Forastera; the title translates to ‘stranger’, completely in line with the way this elusive film plays with identity in the face of grief. Half coming-of-age drama, half ghost story, Aleñar Iglesias’ long-form riff on her 2020 short of the same title continuously slips through your fingers like the fine-grained sand of a Spanish beach, keeping the audience on its toes with an intricate screenplay (written by Aleñar Iglesias) and a pair of deeply affecting but very different performances. This film immediately solidifies the director as yet another Spanish talent to watch.

Catalina (Zoe Stein) and her younger sister Eva (Martina García) spend the summer like they always do, staying with their grandparents in their Mallorca beach house. Catalina’s grandmother (Marta Angelat), who she is named after, is doting on her girls like all grandmas do; her grandfather Tomeu (Lluís Homar) loves them too but is more reserved in showing it, like all men. It is a carefree summer of getting spoiled and spending time on the beach. Following a romantic tryst with a Swedish boy (Nonni Ardal), Catalina returns home late one night to find her grandmother dead after a nasty fall. Catalina’s mother (Núria Prims), flying in from Madrid to handle the funeral, has a difficult relationship with her father, which makes the task of comforting Tomeu and guiding him through this difficult time fall on Catalina. A teenager still trying to find out who she is, she is eager to take on the role, and through objects and a striking dress she begins to blend into her grandmother. Or does her grandmother become her?

Catalina’s age allows Aleñar Iglesias to play around with the tropes of a teenager stepping into an adult world that we see so often in cinema, but by keeping the character and her motivations so enigmatic Forastera builds its tightrope tension mostly in the scenes that are not your typical coming-of-age storyline. The scenes with Max, her summer love, pale in comparison to the interaction with the other man in her life at this point in time, Tomeu. Her flirty romance with the boy is a way to show the other side of her teenage coin. A bewitching campfire scene (that reminds us of Portrait of a Lady on Fire‘s iconic titular moment) enchants, but it is her taking on the role of her grandmother and the crackling interplay between her and her grandfather that lends the film its strength, and the imbalance in impact between the two storylines can be felt.

Luckily Aleñar Iglesias spends most of Forastera exploring the dynamic between the young girl and the old man, frozen in time by grief and a longing for the woman who still wanders around like a ghost. Not literally, of course, although a white-sheet version like in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is definitely teased at, but through the presence of Catalina and her resplendent red and white dress, found in her grandma’s closet, and the tried-and-tested use of some clever reflections. Forastera also wrong-foots its audience on several occasions by subverting expectations, setting up scenes in such a way that it hints at the relationship between granddad and granddaughter shifting in unexpected and even inappropriate directions, only to pull the rug with sharp editing and a tight mise-en-scene.

Aleñar Iglesias has a firm hand on the proceedings anyway, taking total control over the image to ease the audience into seeing more than there is merely through visual suggestion. Compositions are precise, and slanted angles combined with suspenseful music (by Filip Leyman and Anna Von Hausswolff) add to the unsettling atmosphere that gives this the tone of a psychological thriller; only when the score goes more conventional in an attempt to amp up the melodrama does the film falter and lose its grip. Aleñar Iglesias’ ability to keep an audience guessing where this story, essentially a small-scale character drama, will go next is what’s most impressive about the film.

One of the reasons Forastera is so intriguing and absorbing is Stein’s enigmatic central performance. Reprising and expanding her role from Aleñar Iglesias’ original short, Stein deftly navigates between teenage girl and wizened old lady; Catalina is an ‘old soul’, you might say, and with the added difficulty that Catalina’s reaction is not outwardly emotional Stein has to communicate the girl’s feelings through eyes and body language alone. The actress made her debut in Carlos Vermut’s Manticore, another film where sexual tension between a young girl and an old man may or may not be present, and impresses once again with an assured and restrained performance. Opposite her, Homar has the more straightforward role of the grieving widower who does get to show his emotions, his tears and his despondency, his tempers and his wistfulness. The veteran actor, with his grizzled face and gravelly voice, gives Tomeu texture and creates a well-rounded supporting character without which Stein’s Catalina wouldn’t work.

The director plays around with shifting identities through the character of Catalina, but also through the language, with Spanish and Catalan shapeshifting the character. It is subtle touches like this that make Forastera such a lovely little film to dig into and analyze. A ‘ghost’ in the house that gives Tomeu closure, but lingers around in a small bit of magical realism, a beauty spot that doesn’t wash off, the blending of generations expressed through the fashion cycle. All of these elements work together to turn Forastera into one of the most impressive debuts of the year, a film that slowly lures you in by making you think this is another entry into Spain’s growing body of social realist stories told by young directors, only to go in unexpected and exciting directions once it has ensnared you.