‘The Message’ review: Low-key black-and-white pleasure from Argentina’s Iván Fund

Dir. Iván Fund. Argentina/Spain/Uruguay 2025. 91mins

The young heroine of Argentinian drama The Message is not a horse whisperer, exactly – more an empathetic gazer at, and seemingly a ‘channeler’ of all manner of beasts. The latest feature from long-established director Iván Fund (The Lips, 2010; Dusk Stone, 2021) is a quietly mesmerising trip that deals its sparse handful of narrative cards entirely at its own pace. Leisurely in rhythm, and gorgeously but simply shot in black and white, The Message offers a gently off-kilter depiction of childhood and its relation to the non-human universe. This very accomplished low-key pleasure looks set to connect with niche audiences long after its Berlin Competition debut.

The comic elements emerge of their own accord 

Setting a characteristic tone, the film begins at night, with the inhabitants of a camper van largely kept out of sight off-screen; all we can be sure of at first is a young girl scrutinising a tortoise that has been brought to her by its anxious owner. Then, as the vehicle moves by daylight across a rural landscape, we get to know the three central characters: a young girl named Anika (Anika Bootz), and two elderly people, Myriam (Mara Bastelli), a woman with dangly earrings and a dash of bohemian glamour, and the rakish-looking, fedora-wearing, altogether taciturn Roger (Marcelo Subiotto).

A stop-off at a pet cemetery reveals the trio’s occupation: the adults promote Anika’s services as an ‘Animal Communicator’, able to fathom the thoughts of pets, whether alive or dead, and to reveal their messages to their human owners. Cats, horses, a dog racked by self-doubt, a very twitchy hedgehog apparently pining for its siblings – any fauna are Anika’s domain, even a capybara, the outsize South American rodent encountered en route. 

The trio live and sleep in cramped conditions in the van, subsisting on petrol station snacks and corncobs gleaned in fields. For much of the film, we are left to speculate about the nature of their relationship. Are the two adults – whom Anika addresses by their first names - her grandparents? Are they running a scam on a gullible clientele, or do they believe in the powers of this pre-pubescent Dr Doolittle? And shouldn’t the girl be at school, or is she on holiday – perhaps the sort of extended existential vacation that so often seems to occur in art movies about childhood?

Answers begin to fall into place when the travellers reach their intended destination – a rural mental hospital resembling a rundown holiday camp. But The Message is less about answering questions, and more about immersing us in the everyday of these characters’ strange existence. Despite the ostensibly bizarre subject matter, the film finds its perfect register by playing things absolutely straight – letting the comic elements emerge of their own accord along with the lyricism.

The vagueness around the characters and their backstories gives The Message something of the drifting feel of other, similarly languid South American fictions – we are not that far in spirit from the early peripatetic films of Lisandro Alonso (e.g. Liverpool), but without the emphatic longueurs, or from another laconic Argentinian road movie, Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias (2011). Beautifully shot by Gustavo Schiaffino, with the landscapes often viewed head-on or laterally through windshield or side windows, as if from the characters’ distracted point-of-view, the film is a drift through an ostensibly mundane landscape that occasionally reveals striking features – like a river in a long gorge – that become a natural playground for Anika. 

Our questions about whether Anika is being exploited by her guardians are answered to some degree by the performance of young newcomer Bootz, whose joyous expressions and rapport with the adults suggest that she, and the character she plays, are having the time of their lives. Veterans Bestelli and Subiotto – who both appeared in Dusk Stone – exude world-weary tenderness in their responses to her and the journey. Throughout, the film has a winning melancholy charm, enhanced by a spare score from Mauro Morelos featuring plangent solo trumpet and occasional muted horn fanfares. There are bursts of pumping pop too – by, appropriately enough, the Pet Shop Boys.