Sundays: a new great success from the creator of Querer (review)

After the public and critical success of her series, Spaniard Alauda Ruíz de Azúa returns to the big screen with an intelligent film about the identity crisis of a young woman initiated into religious life.

For a little, we would give Aniera, 17 years old, the good Lord without confession. She has large dark eyes, round cheeks, an angelic voice that she exercises in the high school choir and a melancholic air. She also has this faith in God, in the Catholic Church, which animates her as much as it questions her. To the point of inspiring her to pursue a career as a nun, no offense to her father (Miguel Garcés), a widower undergoing reconstruction overwhelmed by this unusual teenage crisis. Or to his aunt, fiercely atheist, and supported by Patricia López Arnaiz whose skeptical fever sometimes eclipses the young Blanca Soroa. Because it is on this, on the sincere candor that emerges from his youthful features, that this almost metaphysical contemplative reflection is based.

The interest of this film lies above all in its refreshing update of a cinematic chestnut often associated with the horror genre, with a dusty Middle Ages or with some macabre rites. Telling the story of the beginnings of a vocation in a Gen-Z teenager, a product of a Western society where doubt has taken precedence over dogma, was by no means obvious. And if Spanish director Alauda Ruíz de Azúa manages to avoid the pitfalls of such an exercise – without managing, however, to spare herself some avoidable lengths – it is because with Sundays, she is above all opening a new chapter in her study of femininity, begun in her first feature film, Lullaby (2022), and extended in her series Querer (2024). Between initiation into the Mystery and adolescent impulses, the notion of “body” takes precedence over that of “faith” – it is the body of the young woman against the body of the congregation, the interested individuality against the abnegation of the collective. Skillful conversion.

By Alauda Ruiz de Azua. With Blanca Sorda, Patricia Lopez Arnaiz, Juan Minujin… Duration: 1h58. Released February 11, 2025