In the bravura opening sequence of The Beloved, the acclaimed film director Esteban Martínez is a legend both for his films and for his past marked by violence and excess. For his new project, he offers his daughter Emilia a role under the pretext of helping her with her stalled acting career. Living together on set will foster a closeness they haven’t shared for years, but it will also reopen old wounds that never healed. Sorogoyen’s emotionally blistering drama examines the rippling consequences that stem from enabling the imperious ‘genius artist’, a film that tellingly echoes the Me Too movement without ever drawing a clear line in that direction.

In Sorogoyen’s most arresting stylistic gambit, the film plays out across a range of formats and lenses, from traditional celluloid to black and white digital photography to DV-Cam, oscillating at random to maintain a sense of displacement and anxiety. A kind of bitter, caustic inverse of last year’s Sentimental Value, Sorogoyen does away with any sense of gentleness, as snarling Bardem (in his finest and most terrifying performance since No Country for Old Men) delivers an electric shock to the ‘film–about-filmmaking’ archetype.