Death Waits Beneath the Glow

MOVIE REVIEWS
Salón de Belleza
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 50m
Director: Nathalia Acevedo
Writers: Nathalia Acevedo, Diego Sepulveda, based on the novel by Mario Bellatin
Cast: Sam Louwyck, Erwan Kepoa Falé, Michelle Astrid, Mar Duran, Marvin Durán, Christian Évora, Annika Henderson, Simone Bucio
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: There’s something uniquely unsettling about a place created to make people beautiful becoming somewhere they go to die. SALÓN DE BELLEZA never needs to underline that contradiction because Director/co-writer Nathalia Acevedo builds the entire film around it, allowing beauty, illness, memory, loneliness, and mortality to exist beside one another without forcing them into a clearly defined statement. The result is a film that asks for patience and offers very little conventional comfort in return. However, the longer its strangeness settles in, the harder it becomes to shake its images and ideas.

Adapted from Mario Bellatin’s acclaimed 1994 novel, the story is set in an unnamed city consumed by an unnamed illness. At the center is the Individuo (Sam Louwyck), who runs a beauty salon that’s gradually become a refuge for people abandoned elsewhere, creating a place where those nearing death can come without promises of recovery or explanations about what comes next. Keeping both the city and the disease undefined gives the story a quality that feels removed from any single place or period. However, the history surrounding Bellatin’s novel and its connections to the AIDS crisis remain impossible to ignore.

Acevedo doesn’t turn that history into a conventional drama about disease, nor does she seem particularly interested in giving the audience the emotion or release normally associated with stories about caring for the dying. The Individuo isn’t presented as some uncomplicated symbol of goodness whose purpose is to save everyone around him. Care here can be detached, routine, uncomfortable, contradictory, and sometimes almost impersonal, which makes the film much more challenging than a version built around obvious compassion would have been. I had such an interesting feeling while watching scenes where this all played out. There’s something here that feels removed from it all.

That becomes one of SALÓN DE BELLEZA’s strengths and one of the reasons I couldn’t completely surrender to it. Acevedo lets moments linger while the timeline, memory, and physical space begin to loosen around the characters, creating the sensation that the salon exists somewhere outside time. What’s happened, what is happening, and what may only be remembered or imagined can occupy the same space. This approach works beautifully when the film captures that feeling of people gradually slipping away from the world around them. There are other stretches where that same approach becomes difficult to absorb. At 110 minutes, the deliberate repetition and refusal to provide a conventional narrative structure occasionally make the film feel longer than it warrants. The abstraction can also keep the people within the salon from becoming fully “real”, which is clearly part of the design but creates a strange contradiction: this is a film deeply concerned with human fragility that sometimes keeps individual humanity at a deliberate distance.

Sam Louwyck is well suited to that balance as the Individuo because the performance never reaches for an obvious emotional response. There’s weariness in the character without reducing him to suffering, and his relationship to the people around him feels built through routine rather than dramatic declarations. Erwan Kepoa Falé’s Juan brings another human presence into that experience, and their interactions become more effective because Acevedo resists explaining every connection or assigning a clear meaning to every moment.

Much of SALÓN DE BELLEZA communicates through movement, silence, and sound rather than dialogue, making the physical environment nearly as important as anyone occupying it. Lucy Railton’s music works alongside a detailed soundscape that turns quiet into something flowing rather than space. At the same time, Balthazar Lab’s cinematography allows the salon to shift from refuge, workplace, and memory to something approaching a waiting room between existence and whatever follows. Acevedo came to directing after years as an actor, and there’s an interesting confidence in how willing she is to let a face, a gesture, or someone simply occupying a room carry meaning without immediately translating it for us. That confidence makes up for a lot of the unknown; there’s a purpose in the pause.

The beauty salon itself carries an enormous amount of the film’s meaning. A place once associated with transformation and presentation now houses bodies moving in the opposite direction, creating an uncomfortable relationship between appearance and disappearance. Beauty isn’t mocked or treated as meaningless in the face of death, though; if anything, SALÓN DE BELLEZA suggests that the desire for beauty becomes more complicated when everything surrounding it is temporary. The salon can be both a reminder of what these people once sought and one of the final places willing to receive them.

Keeping the illness unnamed also prevents the film from becoming a historical reenactment of one particular epidemic. The echoes of AIDS, institutional abandonment, fear of contaminated bodies, and the isolation experienced by queer communities remain unmistakable. Still, Acevedo allows those ideas to extend outward toward a broader question about what societies do with people they no longer want to see. The outside city feels fractured and increasingly distant, leaving the salon as a space occupied by people who have effectively been removed from ordinary life before they have actually died. It’s one of the film's most interesting twists: the institutions of the past would often guess at ailments, almost making them feel unnamed, and this approach does the same here. We may think we know, but we’re only guessing.

There’s something harsh in the absence of false hope. Many movies about terminal illness build toward reconciliation, revelation, redemption, or some final reassurance that suffering contains a larger purpose, while SALÓN DE BELLEZA refuses to manufacture that. People walk through the door, remain for a while, and disappear, leaving behind traces that may eventually become indistinguishable from memory. It can feel cold, though that coldness also protects the film from reducing death to an emotional transaction.

The problem is that refusing sentimentality doesn’t automatically create depth. There are moments when Acevedo’s commitment to atmosphere becomes so complete that the film risks feeling like an intellectual exercise, with its people serving the ideas rather than the other way around. I wanted slightly more access to some of the lives passing through this space, not necessarily through additional dialogue or exposition, but through moments that would make their absence register with greater force.

That reservation keeps SALÓN DE BELLEZA from reaching the next level for me, though it doesn’t diminish how assured Acevedo’s first feature is. She has taken Bellatin’s brief, unsettling novel and resisted the urge to expand it into something more conventional simply because cinema gives her more time and space to fill. Instead, she uses that space to let uncertainty accumulate, asking us to remain in a place where beauty survives beside decay and where caring for another person doesn’t necessarily mean being able to save them.

SALÓN DE BELLEZA is demanding, sometimes frustrating, and intentionally unwilling to meet an audience halfway. It also understands something far more difficult than simply making death sad. When every promise of recovery has disappeared, being given somewhere to remain may become its own form of dignity, even when nobody inside that room pretends it will change how the story ends.

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[photo courtesy of FAROL, KINTSUGI CINE]

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