‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’ Review: Chilean LGBTQ Western is a Haunting, Lyrical Fable About Love and Loss [A-] TIFF
Chile’s selection to this year’s Best International Feature Oscar race, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, continues that country’s remarkable string of featuring poignant films with honest, realistic LGBTQ+ themes. The latest, the directorial debut for Chilean Diego Cespedes, exemplifies why people attend film festivals—to discover windows into other parts of the world through stories that are deeply personal while conveying a subtle universality.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes and is nominally about a queer family and community living in a remote area of Chile. But by telling its quiet little unassuming story, it reveals itself as a lot more than just a movie about family ties. It is about the magical realism of Latin American cultures, the deep devotion to family and friends that characterizes its peoples, and the ultimately tragic but unflinching conviction that carries forward the victims of these cultures and their at times oppressive and unforgiving values.
The title suggests that the movie is centered on one of the individuals who inhabits an eclectic whorehouse/saloon in a remote, mountainous Chilean mining community. The year is 1984, and “Flamingo,” as he is known to his friends, is, in his telling, a fabulous transvestite. Though most of the film’s characters would be called trans women by Western 2025 audiences, writer/director Cespedes is clear from the get-go that he is setting this story in its time and in his country. The men are always dressed as women, sport long nails and hair, and refer to themselves with she/her/hers pronouns in Spanish, but they specifically and pointedly identify as transvestites.
The title may also refer to one of the movie’s central conflicts. There is a “plague” that is mysteriously claiming the lives of many of the women—and some of the miners, too—and the locals are convinced that it is passed on by a deep stare into the eyes of one of the women. It does not help their fantastical beliefs that all the women refer to each other by nicknames after exotic animals—boa, eagle—all based on supposed anthropomorphic characteristics that their elderly matron spied on them at some unknown earlier time.
Caught between the at times violent and at times tender give and take between the rambunctious women and the fearful men is Lidia. She is eleven and was raised by the women, but mostly by Flamingo as her mother. The two exhibit the beginnings of the tense relationship that characterizes a dynamic between mother and teenage daughter, but the love could not be more unadorned, or more real.
As the story of their lives unfold, you are drawn slowly but assuredly into these people’s lives. There is love and heartbreak, tragedy and celebration. Cespedes unfolds his characters with a delicate balance between empathy and restraint, resorting to melodrama when the women do so, mostly for fun.
The most sweeping parts of the movie are perhaps the magnificent if hostile desert landscape. The film’s most poignant element is the quiet but decisive cinematography by Angello Faccini, lingering just enough in each shot to evoke a sense of melancholy, imbuing each frame with feeling, be it pain, love lost, or longing. The fact that the movie is styled as a western at times, together with its musical riffs in Florencia di Concilio’s score, makes it all the more surreal.
And so it is that The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo delivers on its promise of telling you a local but universal story. The world of these women and those who surround them is that of a quiet code, governed by dignity, mutual respect and support. Of desperate (maybe, futile) attempts at survival. Joy is ever present and ever vanishing, and portrayed to perfection by each member of this outstanding ensemble cast. Cespedes respects his subject matter, his characters, and his actresses way too much to pity them or exploit them—instead, he treats them with precisely the level of dignity they demand to be treated, including to the men and boys who would disrespect them.
The result is a poetic western that explores not just identity and belonging, but the resilience that makes us human. Its dedicated artistry is a true testament to the bounty of Chilean cinema today. The emotional honesty that lingers after the credits roll will stay with you for the rest of the film festival, or whenever you may watch it. It will remind one of the power of cinema to illuminate even the smallest, most remote corners of the human experience, and make you come back for more.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (La misteriosa mirada del flamengo) had its North American premiere. It is Chile’s selection for the International Feature Film Oscar for the 2026 Academy Awards. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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