Sundays (2025)

Ainara won’t explain herself, and the film won’t do it for her. Seventeen, bright, a boarder at a Catholic school, she tells her family she wants to enter a convent, answers their questions with a steadiness that reads as either peace or evasion, and leaves me in the family’s position: asked to judge a girl I can’t quite read.

That is the situation in Sundays (Los domingos), Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s drama of a Basque family whose weekly lunches become the arena for the argument. Blanca Soroa, in her first screen role, plays Ainara. Her father, Iñaki (Miguel Garcés), is distracted by a struggling business. Her aunt Maite (Patricia López Arnaiz), an atheist who has done much of the mothering, hears the word convent as a verdict on everything she has given the girl.

Whether that opacity works depends on how much a viewer needs. I wanted more of Ainara than I was given, and the want sharpened in the final stretch, where the tone turns harsher than the patient, even-handed drama before it. Some viewers will find the withholding frustrating. I found it a fair price, mostly, because the film suggests her inner life through behaviour rather than speeches, and when emotion finally breaks through it lands with real force. Her stillness holds the screen for long stretches, and watching her listen while the adults argue about her future became, for me, the most absorbing activity in the film.

The Sunday tables expose the people around her instead. Her father and her aunt each say they are defending Ainara’s freedom, and each does it by trying to overrule her. Iñaki professes open-mindedness while imposing his will. Maite’s liberalism hardens into ultimatum, and when a nun shows no idea that Maite’s line of work even exists, her certainties look, for a moment, as parochial as the convent’s. Ruiz de Azúa gives belief and unbelief equal scrutiny, and the film declines to rule whether Ainara’s calling is love, influence, or a blend of both. Its craft never leans on the scale, which is how a story this loaded earns its ambiguity. The film catches both adults out without contempt, so I could not side with either of them, and the lunches, which could have turned into set-piece debates, keep feeling like a family.

López Arnaiz, who won the Goya for Best Actress, plays Maite as ally and obstacle at once, a woman whose love and need to control have become hard to tell apart. Nagore Aranburu’s Mother Superior is serene and deliberately opaque, more unsettling than any villain could be. Juan Minujín’s Uncle Pablo lightens the air. Mabel Rivera’s grandmother adds another generation to the table, and the dialogue, sharp and sometimes close to comedy, lets the family be funny before it wounds. Money worries and Maite’s strained marriage mutter beneath the main quarrel, and the Spanish and Basque spoken on screen root the family in its setting.

Freedom, the film insists, cannot be handed to someone who wants a different kind of freedom. Ruiz de Azúa, who wrote as well as directed and who followed her Goya-winning debut Lullaby (2022) with something bolder, leaves that verdict to us. The work took the top prize at San Sebastián and the Goyas for Best Film, Director, and Original Screenplay. Anyone who likes family drama that treats faith and doubt as equals, and who enjoys arguing about a film afterwards, should seek it out. At 115 minutes, it asks for patience.