Final Rating: 4/5
In film history, female filmmakers were anecdotes. Despite being pioneers, they are relegated to side notes in favor of the canon. There are multiple examples, such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, which was not as widely recognized as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. There are multiple examples of that in history, especially in the Global South.
In 1980, a young Marcela Fernández Violante shocked the Mexican film industry. She presented Misterio (Mystery | Studio Q), a film experimenting with the line between reality and fiction. Fantasia Film Festival holds its 4K restoration world premiere. The film had its original 4K negatives scanned in 4K at Terminal in Mexico City, with the materials preserved by the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE).
It tells the story of a soap opera studio in Mexico. They are shooting new chapters; meanwhile there is a lot of drama around the set. Alex (Juan Ferrara) is the star of the show, yet, he has trouble managing fame and his relationship with his wife, Silvia (Helena Rojo), his co-star.
The film takes place on a filming day during which everyone is unwilling to work. Alex gets tired of the fame and the difficulty of talking to his wife; the TV director is aiming to convince people and manage the crazy environment, while Glayds, (Beatriz Sheridan), the screenwriter, complains about the experience with everyone. In the end, the crew is getting mad.
Observing the context, Misterio is a brave film. Marcela Fernández Violante, the director and writer, analyzes one of the backbones of her local culture and Latin Americans as a whole – the Telenovelas. Each day, millions of Latinos watch the new chapters of a melodrama after their exhausting work shifts. They are stories about cheating, familial betrayal, repressed sexual desires, and moral dilemmas.
At first, the film is a reconstruction of the daily hardship of shooting multiple chapters at once. Classics like La Usurpadora had 120 episodes, and María La Del Bairro had 180 episodes. Consequently, making that many episodes results in plenty of ongoing changes during filming, also dependent on the audience’s reactions. Thus, a telenovela is equivalent to stress and problems.
In this sense, Fernández Violante creates a metalinguistic film that plays with the notion of reality and media. Her directing works in the sense that, as an audience, we are always unsure of what is fictional and what is reality for those characters. The production design by Rafael Suárez assigns a notion of farce. We are unsure whether each of the sets has windows for cameras to shoot inside – yet when we think it is not the case, it is.
We might associate it with The Truman Show, where everything is a faux-reality. Here the smaller scale of the warehouse set creates a sense of manipulation shifting from the inner life to public perception. As each set diminishes the notion of reality, the psychological effects elevate, leading to an extreme reaction.
Finally, the last ten minutes crown Juan Ferrara with a ferocious performance of an overwhelmed man, corrupted by the stimuli around him. The blurry line between faux and reality bothers his perspective, creating a collapse of his persona. Marcela Fernández Violante might imprint a few excesses throughout the film. She crafts a fascinating metalinguistic aspect in Misterio, a film that illustrates the dangers of media, including those who make it.
Misterio (Studio Q) was seen during the 2026 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
