Clara Sola

This atmospheric debut from Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén combines mud, moss and mysticism to arresting effect.

In the end, the metaphor gets in the way of the emotion.

Clara Sola is superbly filmed and composed with a very humid sense of atmosphere, and Araya’s performance is a miracle of sympathy and candour.

Clara Sola is a delicate, emotionally intelligent portrait of a woman finding her way in the world.

Sometimes films like this are so murky and open to interpretation that it's kind of annoying, but I actually found this one really engaging.

There might be no better time... to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s “Clara Sola” offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

It’s difficult to explain what exactly held me back from liking this film more, but while Clara’s connection to her surroundings and her pursuit of clarity was reasonably expressed, I had a hard time connecting to all of it myself.

“Coming-of-age” isn’t usually a genre applied to stories about forty-year-old women, but Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola embraces the challenge with an intimate portrait of a sometimes difficult protagonist with a dash of magical realism.

Clara Sola shows what happens when enough finally becomes enough. A breaking point decades in the making over something that never should have been taken from Clara in the first place: her autonomy.

Director-cowriter Natalie Alvarez Mesen takes a sharply observant approach, along the way finding wider insight into the ways outsiders struggle to find their voice.