La Canícula

La Canícula follows the intimate life of a family of recluses during a scorching season of fires. When María, the matriarch, dies in her deteriorating pink house in the center of the city, her grandchildren must take charge of her burial while coping with the daily toll of caring for the older women in their household.

 

The family is made up of Selmo, the soft-handed caretaker; Dolores, his blunt and practical sister; Magnolia, his proud and cantankerous mother; Inés, an aunt whose mind drifts between childlike lucidity and confusion; and Peregrina, a half-sister who suddenly arrives to say goodbye to her mother, María. As all these people converge, the house becomes a microcosm of resistance to monotony and inherited trauma under the heat.

 

The film opens with a palm grove on fire. Around the house, the construction of new residential towers slowly advances, while national news reports on new fires and alleged archaeological discoveries.

 

Packs of mixed-breed dogs roam the property, and the heat becomes increasingly unbearable. Amid this overwhelming environment, the family tends to the rituals and tasks that follow María’s death: dressing her, burying her in the backyard, organizing her belongings, and keeping the household running. Amid these daily chores, old resentments, petty cruelties, and moments of tenderness emerge, as the family struggles to hold itself together in a world undergoing abrupt change.

 

Into this constrained world arrives Facundo, a handsome outsider hired to cut the grass at the house. While spraying pesticides under the sun, he collapses from the heat and chemical fumes. Selmo finds him and carries him to his small outbuilding, a private space set apart from the main house. There, Selmo cares for Facundo as he recovers: he bathes him, feeds him, and reads to him. Through these simple, almost domestic acts, a strong and unexpected bond begins to develop between them. In the outbuilding, away from the obligations and tensions of the family home, Selmo finds a space where he can care for someone out of desire rather than duty.

 

Facundo represents for Selmo the possibility of a different life: a world beyond his home, desire, pleasure, and an existence not entirely determined by the needs of others.

 

But as their bond deepens, everything around them begins to unravel. Magnolia’s health deteriorates; the family clashes over wakes and rules of decorum, and old resentments begin to replace everyday life. Meanwhile, the heat grows increasingly extreme. The air hangs motionless, and the fires and fantastical rumors seem to multiply. The tension inside the house rises in tandem with the world outside, until finally the sky darkens and a great storm breaks.

 

An invasion of hundreds of dogs eventually breaches the domestic space, plunging the household into physical chaos and exposing the fragility of the order that holds it together.

 

Throughout the story, radio and television broadcasts connect the family’s intimate grief to a broader social deterioration: scandals, removals from office, drownings—allowing private loss to coexist with a growing sense of collective unease.

 

In the end, routines resume, and Selmo remains suspended between duty and desire: his longing has awakened, but remains unresolved. The house endures: imperfect, stubborn, sustained by rigid rituals, small acts of mercy, and the people who refuse to abandon it.

The film is an elegy to endurance, an exploration of grief as labor, and a portrait of a family holding on while the world around them burns.