The relationship between theater and film has always been very close. Vaudevilles are often seen as direct precursors to film and the amount of plays-turned-films and films-turned-plays/shows is staggering. This connection is perfectly clear in "Siempreviva", a play in film form... that apparently was never a play before a film. Set in the mid-1980s, at the height of Colombia's guerrilla attacks, entirely in a Bogotá apartment building where several families live next to each other and share spaces like the bathroom and the dining room, where most of the action takes place, "Siempreviva" (the Spanish word for liveforever plants, and with the same literal translation) economizes on locations and characters to be able to expend on their relations instead.
Three main families live in this building: Lucía and her children: Julieta and Humberto, Sergio & Victoria who make a volatile and short-on-money couple and finally lonely Carlos whose son is off to school in the USA. These families relate by sharing spaces, their respective debts and money lendings and by living in a troubled city in troubled times. These relations and the personal problems of their participants are the main edge of the movie for the first third, allowing us time to get to know them well. After this period we find out that Julieta has gone missing after an attack on the Colombian Palace of Justice where she interns, causing the rest of the characters to start an investigation to find out what happened to her.
This is not an investigative thriller however, so we eventually go back to mostly interpersonal conflict under the same roof, marked by a very Latin American sense of resignation. By having all the action occur on a single location, director Klych López follows on the footsteps of another very literally theatrical film, "Birdman", and tries to shoot the entire movie as if appearing to be a single continuous shot, although also not in real time (every shot "fade" leads to a time skip of a few weeks or months). Much like in that other movie, the result in "Siempreviva" is of a strong immersion and, to summarize, a feeling very similar to that of a play.
While the movie does not necessarily exploit every "cinematic" resource at its disposition and could probably work as well or even better on stage, it is still a very cleverly-realized telling of a story that uses the microcosm to reflect on many aspects of the inevitably political, socially complicated macrocosm that most of Latin America shares and knows well. "Siempreviva" reminds us that faith, conflict and pain have and will continue to liveforever with our human condition.
