La Canícula

Ciro, a middle-aged man with a corpulent physique, lives confined to his childhood home with his sister Dolores and the women who raised them. Together they maintain the estate and manage daily chores, their lives structured around silence, duty, and unspoken agreements. Ciro hides his homosexuality, keeping his desires secret, while Dolores quietly supports him. They share small pacts that allow them to navigate a strict, mocking Catholic society, the legacy of dictatorship, and the pressures of family loyalty.

 

Their fragile routine is disrupted by the return of Peregrina, a long-lost aunt, who arrives after the death of her mother, María. Peregrina challenges the household’s order: she proposes selling the house, which Magnolia refuses, and insists on exhuming her mother to give her a proper wake. When she invites people, no one comes—the family has been forgotten. Peregrina also speaks of a vault buried on the estate, said to hold Spanish coins from centuries ago. To search for it, she brings a young treasure hunter named Facundo, whose presence unsettles the household and awakens something in Ciro.

 

Facundo begins befriending Ciro, who finds himself drawn to the young man in a way he has never allowed himself with anyone else.

 

While Ciro has had fleeting encounters that never surpass to any penetration with Eugenia, a neighbor in her fifties with a masculine face, his growing connection with Facundo encourages him to explore his sexuality more openly. As they explore the grounds with a metal detector, Facundo tells Ciro about the world outside the estate, including the Lido Theater, a crumbling porn cinema that only plays heterosexual films in the city center frequented by gay men. Ciro visits the theater, having encounters that are tentative and unsatisfying, but they mark the first steps toward confronting a truth he has long repressed.

 

 

Meanwhile, Inés, Ciro and Dolores’s relative who struggles with dementia, is preoccupied with her missing or possibly dead husband, Francisco. In her confusion, she begins to believe that Francisco has returned in the form of one of the mongrel dogs that roam the town and plague the estate. Her obsession with the dog adds another layer of instability to the household, blurring the line between reality and memory, and highlighting the surreal environment in which Ciro and his family live.

 

 

Amid talk of selling the house, the exhumation of the dead, the search for hidden treasure, and the presence of the mongrel dogs, the family estate becomes a site of conflict, desire, and revelation. Ciro is forced to confront his long-suppressed desires, the pull of a life beyond the estate, and the choices that define loyalty, love, and freedom. The arrival of Peregrina and Facundo, the rituals of the past, and the echoes of lost lives compel Ciro to decide whether he will remain bound to secrecy and duty or finally embrace a truth that has always been within him.