Avaliações do Metacritic

[A] sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut.

Utama sounds a warning even as it casts a spell, and the spell is one of life and death and eternal returns and never-ending struggles, and the rest we can try to take when the work is done for the day.

Admittedly, Utama is a simple story, but one that packs an emotional punch without endless exposition or symbolism.

Utama is very much a pessimistic film, never shying away from the realities faced by those who still inhabit the highlands of Bolivia. And yet it’s also convincingly, and sometimes movingly, optimistic.

Through the love story at the heart of this visually arresting feature debut, Utama offers the audience a relatable connection with a way of life which is on the verge of extinction.

It’s an astonishingly assured and emotionally engrossing debut. Grisi’s background as an award-winning photographer is evident in the composition of every shot, almost any one of which could hang on the wall of a gallery wall. Yet his narrative focus is always on Virginio and Sisa, whose expressions of intimacy and love are largely non-verbal yet deeply felt.

For all its otherworldly beauty, “Utama” could benefit from slightly more robust dramatic beats to complement the hyper-sensorial experience that imbues in the spectator, especially in addressing the displacement of Indigenous communities across the Americas and beyond.

Utama is a slow-motion look at how communities can falter, how rich heritage can be lost—to indifference from governments as well as a climate crisis that will decimate their way of life. If only it weren’t so gentle in its reminder.

Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.

While climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.