‘A Poet’ review: A failed Colombian poet mentors a promising young talent

Dir/scr: Simon Mesa Soto. Colombia/Germany/Sweden. 2025. 123mins

“I’m a poet,” protests the put-upon protagonist of Colombian Simon Mesa Soto’s Un Certain Regard title. “Actually, you’re unemployed,” comes his sister’s retort, an exchange which tidily summarises the subject of this engaging piece about a washed-up Medellin bard in search of spiritual redemption. Driven by a compelling performance from non-professional Ubeimar Rios as a man out of time, Mesa Soto’s second feature is simultaneously satisfyingly tragic and hilarious.

Deftly touches on themes of contemporary importance 

It also signals a return to Cannes for the filmmaker who competed at the festival with both his short films Mother (2016) and Leidi (2014) – the latter winning the short film Palme d’Or – and played Critics Week with his 2022 feature debut Amparo, which netted star Sandra Melissa Torres the strand’s Rising Star Award. As with that film, further festival play is likely for A Poet, and Epicentre secured French rights ahead of its Cannes debut.

Protagonist Oscar Restrepo’s (Rios) last literary success was a poetry award in the 1990s. He has done little since other than live out the myth of the street poet, like a lesser-known Colombian Bukowski. In the real world, this translates into drinking too much, living in virtual penury with his sick mother Teresita (Margarita Soto), humiliatingly borrowing money from his teenage daughter Daniela (Alisson Correa) – who later confesses, painfully, to feeling pity for her father – and signing up for dodgy money-making schemes that never go anywhere.

On Oscar’s living-room wall there is a portrait of his hero, the great Columbian poet José Asunción Silva, who shot himself at 30. “You might achieve recognition after death,” Oscar’s more successful friend Efrain (Guillermo Cardona) tells him, “but first you’d have to have written a great poem. And you haven’t done that.” It’s a good line in a film whose early part is teeming with them.

Oscar takes part in first a poetry reading (significantly attended only by middle-aged male poets) and then a chat show on local TV: bleak comic humiliation is the inevitable result. But when he’s offered a job teaching in a school, Oscar is struck by the stunning drawings and poems in the notebook of 15-year-old Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), who lives with her enormous, chaotic family in the outskirts of Medellin. Oscar decides to do some good in the world by mentoring her, to shape Yurlady into the great poet he failed to become. 

The canny but morally appalling Efrain, whose success is based on the notion that success as a poet is giving people what they want to hear, decides that Yurlady should start off the local poetry festival with a poem “about her skin colour”. She delivers her poem and the awfulness of her life is duly applauded by the Columbian cultural class. But at the celebration party, Yurlady collapses unconscious in the bathroom, leading into a bleakly farcical and less focused third act in which, if possible, Oscar’s disgrace intensifies still further.

This is very much Oscar’s film, and Rios plays him to perfection. A Poet would be a very difficult film to watch if it was simply scene after scene of abject humiliation, but quickly the viewer warms to this character. There is a saintlike purity and hence pathos about our mad, misunderstood hero – with his buck teeth, his check shirts, his slightly hunched figure, his endless resilience and his immense energy – because he’s the pretty much the only person here motivated by something other than money. 

There are plenty of secondary performances to enjoy, as well as much verbal and visual wit. But the sombre heart of A Poet is in the relationship between Oscar and Yurlady, which is drawn and performed with tenderness and emotional directness. There’s the sense that Oscar has a great deal of hope invested in the quietly winning Yurlady, who seems permanently baffled by why this old man has taken this interest in her. Just as Oscar, who has been a bad father, might be seeking to now become a good one, Yurlady, whose own father is absent, might be seeking one. 

Dialogue-driven and sometimes meandering, initially A Poet gives the impression of being as shambolic as Oscar himself but, via Soto’s carefully-honed script, it deftly touches on themes of contemporary importance. One is the commercialisation of art, the death of creativity as a vehicle of personal expression – one non-too subtle scene has an indigenous man and a woman vociferously arguing with each other about which of them is worse off in society.

Another topic is the marginalisation of alternative voices such as Oscar’s – every institution he’s a part of, from his family to the school he works for, ends up turning against him. Another is how little compassion he seems to merit when the untrue accusations of sexual impropriety start to accumulate, as they must, in the overextended third act. For all its humour and the gentle redemption it promises at the end, A Poet adds up to a damning portrait of a spiritually impoverished society, one that needs its innocent madmen and dreamers more than it dares admit.