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For the film ‘Adulto’, growing up is intrinsically traumatic. It’s stressful, painful, confusing, and no one helps you. In fact, ‘Adulto' presents growing up like being inside of a box. The world is a box and it is squeezing the main character, Antonio. We meet Antonio at the start of the film drawing geometric shapes for what looks like school homework. Symbolically he is drawing the borders of the box that will follow him for the rest of the film. And that box is the frame of the camera.
It is squeezing him, rubbing right up against his face. We, the audience, aren’t permitted to breathe throughout the film. The frame is shoved up right into people’s faces, making them seem both huge and small. Huge in real life, but small and alone in their own world. Antonio isn’t allowed to escape from the invasive and claustrophobic camera. The frame is trapping Antonio and that frame is adulthood.
This is what adulthood is for the director, Mariano González. It is not a world of compassion, as we watch compassion slip from the hands of Antonio. He struggles to hold onto it because the adult world is full of laws, rules, and most importantly selfishness.
‘Adulto’ isn’t inspiring. It’s the opposite of inspiring: depressing. It is an incredibly disheartening film. González paints a…
