‘Romería’ Review: Carla Simón’s Restrained Coming-of-Age Tale Opens Up the Doors of History and Cinema [B+] Atlanta Film Festival

It’s July 2004 on the sunny Atlantic coast of Spain, in the city of Vigo, Galicia, the gateway to the Cíes Islands. Eighteen-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) has arrived from Barcelona on her first solo trip as a legal adult, finally free to venture beyond her adoptive family. She comes with a purpose: to learn about her biological mother and father, who died when she was young, and whose existence has always felt distant and obscured — kept from her by the guardians who raised her, leaving her cut off from her broader biological family.

Through this simple conceit, Romería gently explores the buried secrets of personal history and the ways our forebears’ actions simultaneously fascinate and disappoint us, deepening our understanding of ourselves. The follow-up to her 2022 drama Alcarràs, co-writer and director Carla Simón again works in a register of naturalistic candor, capturing the soft-spoken poignancy of familial grief and shared history. The revelations in Romería never arrive as dramatic breakthroughs. They’re sobering recognitions that nonetheless carry a life-altering weight.

Marina’s objectives are partly practical: accurate documentation of her family lineage would allow her to apply for university grants, where she hopes to study film. She currently lacks the paperwork to do so, and throughout her stay with her father’s family, stray lines of dialogue reveal long-simmering resistance to officially recognizing her — hand-wringing over whether to sign off on changing her name in the civic records. Practically a stranger to her uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins, Marina comes to embody a historical unease and shame within the family, tracing back to her father’s perceived failures and her mother’s perceived abandonment of him.

Simón’s filmmaking lets you read these dynamics without overexplaining them. The hard feelings show up differently among relatives. Her uncle, Lois (Tristán Ulloa), is more amenable and sympathetic to the reality of how Marina was raised; others are passive-aggressive, quietly bickering over what it truly means to accept her. Since the film is shot from Marina’s perspective, any candid family conversations reach her — and us — only when she happens to be within earshot. Otherwise, it’s smiling faces and practiced warmth, with something unsaid hovering just beneath the surface.

This is also, in part, how the film doles out the details of Marina’s history. Simón resists spelling out the exact circumstances that led to the estrangement, instead trusting stray dialogue and contextual clues to fill the gaps. It’s never stated outright that Marina’s guardians discouraged contact with her biological family, but it’s clearly communicated through implication and atmosphere. The mystery of her parents is handled similarly, though Simón does fall back on the familiar device of an old diary, whose entries are delivered via voice-over, building a more concrete bridge from 2004 back to 1987.

This could easily break the spell Simón is building, but it’s largely used to reinforce the film’s diaristic quality. Broken into chapters documenting each day of Marina’s visit, the film already has the shape of a serialized narrative. The device also paves the way for the film’s most striking sequence, in which past and present are simultaneously literalized and allegorized: Garcia and the actor playing her cousin Nuno, known as Mitch, step out of their present-day roles to inhabit the perspectives of Marina’s parents, staging the joy-turned-dissolution of their relationship. 

In its desire to directly connect the actions of the past with the circumstances of the present, Romería invites comparison to another 2025 Cannes title, The Secret Agent — though where that film examined political corruption at a national scale, Romería narrows its focus to the individual, exploring how one’s origins shape how one understands one’s place in the world. As Marina inhabits her mother’s actions, she becomes directly intertwined with her own history, yet not doomed to the inevitability that comes with reading a story you already know the ending to. She knows her parents are dead; what she discovers is that learning to reckon with their failures offers her a new way of understanding herself.

For all its commitment to evoking real life, Romería can feel overlong, constrained by its own studied restraint. There are moments where you wish the film would let itself breathe differently, where the extended family-gathering scenes would drift with a little more purpose. But Simón handles her subject’s emotional unmooring with care, aided by Hélène Louvart’s cinematography, which transforms the crystal-blue waters and port-town elegance of Vigo into an ethereal passage through the tides of history.

Simón has spoken of Romería as partially autobiographical, a fictionalized account of her real parents’ relationship. With that in mind, the film reads as an excising of old wounds — a reckoning with the realization that one’s parents are not infallible, that they’re human beings capable of dismantling their own lives in deeply unromantic ways. But just as Marina records her family visit through the soft haze of a DV camera, Simón reorients a painful reality through the visual language of film, gaining a kind of control by telling the story on her own terms, with honesty and care. “Romería” is a Spanish term for a pilgrimage to a local shrine, and it’s an apt title. The pilgrimage Simón embarks on here is a subdued but effective coming-of-age, habitually modest in its presentation, yet nonetheless arriving at something satisfying and real.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2026 Atlanta Film Festival. Janus Films has set a limited release of Romería in the U.S. on June 26, 2026.