‘Ashes’ review: Diego Luna directs a quiet exploration of the Mexican immigrant experience

Dir: Diego Luna. Mexico/Spain. 2026. 98mins 

A compassionate, clear-eyed study of a young woman searching for a place to call home, Ashes is driven by Anna Diaz’s evocative performance which expresses a world of discontent through the simplest of glances. Actor/director Diego Luna’s fourth narrative feature follows its protagonist as she makes her way from Mexico to Spain, pursuing her restless mother who went looking for a better life. This modest drama examines complicated family bonds and the ways in which younger children struggle to understand their parents’ motives.

Eamines complicated family bonds and the ways in which children struggle to understand their parents’ motives

Luna’s directorial debut, 2010’s Abel, played as a Special Screening in Cannes, and Ashes will be programmed in the same section for this year’s edition. The Emmy-nominated actor does not appear in the film, although Diaz is a rising star thanks to pictures like Alonso Ruizpalacios’s 2024 Berlin entry La Cocina. With the wayward mother played by Adriana Paz, who was one of the recipients of the 2024 Cannes Best Actress prize for Emilia Perez, Ashes should enjoy further festival play and a probable theatrical run.

In her early 20s, Lucila (Diaz) lives in Spain with her teenage brother Diego (Sergio Bautista), with whom she has had a close bond ever since they were abandoned years ago by their mother Isabel (Paz), who left them behind in Mexico when she escaped her circumstances there. Although all three now reside in Madrid, Lucila still resents her mother, who hardly has a glamorous life working menial jobs. Herself a caretaker, Lucila dreams of moving to Barcelona, which promises more opportunity and excitement.

Based on Brenda Navarro’s acclaimed 2022 novel, Ashes observes Lucila as she navigates the familiar rituals of young adulthood, including female friendship and cute boyfriends. But Diaz brings an ever-present heaviness to the character, borne from her difficult early years. Initially, Luna doesn’t explain precisely why Isabel took off, electing instead to abruptly move the story forward several years into the future after Isabel and her children have already been reunited in Madrid. The audience isn’t privy to the hard conversations that must have occurred between these family members, but we see the after effects through Lucila’s guarded demeanour. If anything, Ashes’ true maternal figure is Lucila, who has raised Diego largely on her own.

Cinematographer Damian García captures the various sun-splashed locales as Lucila’s personal journey takes her from Madrid to Barcelona and then back to her Mexican hometown. Wherever she ventures, however, she’s always something of a foreigner. When Lucila moves to Barcelona to get a taste of independence, she works as a lowly maid while also serving as a delivery driver, desperately trying to trick her new friends into believing that she is actually attending university. (In addition, she has a tough time learning Catalan, which only amplifies her outsider status.) A late-reel plot twist will find Lucila returning to Mexico, but even there, amidst ageing family members she hasn’t seen since childhood, the young woman is disconnected from her surroundings – although the encounter will provide hints regarding Isabel’s initial decision to flee. 

Never asking viewers to pity her character, Diaz plays Lucila with a mixture of resolve and despair as the depressing similarity of the obstacles facing her in each city start to feel insurmountable. Luna films Lucila’s odyssey with a crisp matter-of-factness, but he wisely resists reducing her to an all-encompassing symbol of the migrant experience. To be sure, Ashes pinpoints the bigotry and economic inequality Lucila must endure, but the screenplay, co-written by Luna, focuses on the specificity of this woman’s quest to make peace with her past while daring to imagine a brighter tomorrow. 

Ashes is especially affecting in its depiction of the loving but fraught rapport between Lucila and Diego, who has grown up being worryingly dependent on his big sister. If Lucila exudes a weary determination, her brother seems defeated by their situation, pessimistically responding to Lucila’s desire to move somewhere new for a fresh start that, no matter where they go, “It’s all just surviving.” Without sentimentality or melodramatics, Ashes honours its characters’ battle to persevere.