{"id":13035,"date":"2026-09-24T03:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T03:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=13035"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:22:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:22:32","slug":"when-survival-comes-before-salvation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/when-survival-comes-before-salvation\/","title":{"rendered":"When Survival Comes Before Salvation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 18 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEWS
\nSants<\/strong>
\n –  <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: <\/strong>Drama, Crime
\nYear Released: <\/strong>2026
\nRuntime: <\/strong>1h 43m
\nDirector: <\/strong>Mikel Gurrea
\nWriter(s): <\/strong>Mikel Gurrea, Fran Kosterlitz
\nCast: <\/strong>Victoria Luengo, Ariadna Gil, Eulàlia Ramón, Cosimo Fusco
\nWhere to Watch: <\/strong>shown at the 2026 San Sebastián International Film Festival<\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW: <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>A statue of a saint can represent faith, memory, beauty, history, money, or absolutely nothing depending on who's holding it. SANTS takes advantage of that contradiction, placing sacred objects inside a story about a woman confronting something religion, money, and desperate action are all ultimately powerless to stop: her mother's impending death.<\/p>\n

\n

Lali (Victoria Luengo) has spent years moving through life without settling anywhere for very long. When her mother becomes terminally ill, she returns to Barcelona and finds herself facing the practical realities of care alongside everything she's emotionally unprepared to process. She also needs money, and eventually becomes involved with people who steal religious figures from churches and cemeteries.<\/p>\n

That premise could have easily produced a much louder crime movie. Director Mikel Gurrea is more interested in why Lali lets herself enter this strange little world in the first place, using theft less as an adrenaline rush and more as a way to maintain control. At the same time, an enormous part of her life slips beyond it.<\/p>\n

There's something wonderfully uncomfortable about stealing objects people associate with comfort during death while Lali is preparing for a death of her own. SANTS doesn't need to turn every statue into an obvious metaphor for that idea. However, moments still make the connection between religious imagery, mortality, and Lali's emotional state hard to miss. Gurrea largely trusts the strange nature of the situation to carry its own meaning.<\/p>\n

That restraint doesn't always prevent the symbolism from becoming a little too neat. Once the relationship between dying, faith, sacred objects, and their monetary value becomes apparent, the movie occasionally seems aware of just how perfectly its pieces fit together. A few moments feel constructed around the theme rather than arising naturally from Lali's circumstances. That slight self-consciousness keeps SANTS from being as emotionally effortless as its best material.<\/p>\n

Victoria Luengo is what keeps those ideas attached to an actual person. Lali isn't presented as a noble caregiver temporarily forced into questionable behavior, nor is she transformed into an exciting antihero simply because crime gives her an alternative to the helplessness waiting at home. She's messy, physically worn down, financially unstable, and capable of decisions that make considerably more sense from inside her circumstances than they would from the outside.<\/p>\n

Luengo's performance has an appealing lack of vanity. She reportedly went so far as to have a dental prosthesis removed because she felt a broken tooth belonged to this woman. Still, the more important transformation is the sense that Lali has been surviving without much concern for how presentable that survival looks. She carries herself like someone accustomed to adapting first and worrying about consequences later.<\/p>\n

Gurrea previously directed Luengo in SURO, and that familiarity appears useful here because he doesn't push her performance toward easy grief. Lali isn't constantly demonstrating that she's devastated about her mother, which would have reduced an incredibly complicated relationship to visible sadness. Anticipatory grief can include anger, avoidance, exhaustion, guilt, practicality, and stretches when everyday concerns seem almost absurdly ordinary beside what's coming.<\/p>\n

Ariadna Gil's presence as Lali's mother gives that half of the film the gravity it needs without making the story exclusively about illness. The impending loss is always there, but SANTS recognizes that caring for someone who's dying doesn't suspend every other part of life. Bills still exist, old tensions don't magically disappear, and affection doesn't necessarily make caregiving uncomplicated.<\/p>\n

That matters because Lali's criminal involvement could otherwise feel like it belongs to an entirely separate movie. The further she moves into the world of stolen religious figures, the clearer it becomes that this isn't simply a subplot designed to add excitement to an intimate family drama. Crime gives her movement at the exact moment everything at home is defined by waiting.<\/p>\n

Waiting for someone to die has its own cruel rhythm. There may be appointments, responsibilities, conversations, and preparations, but beneath it all sits an event everyone knows is coming, and nobody can hurry, prevent, or negotiate with. Theft offers Lali the exact opposite: decisions have immediate consequences, risk demands attention, and something can actually be accomplished, even when that accomplishment is illegal.<\/p>\n

That contrast gives SANTS much of its tension without requiring conventional thriller mechanics. Gurrea understands that the dangerous part isn't necessarily whether Lali gets caught stealing something. The bigger question is what she's getting from this life that she can't find while confronting her mother, and whether the distraction helps her cope or merely postpones something she'll eventually have to face.<\/p>\n

The religious artifacts are particularly effective because their spiritual importance and financial value exist simultaneously. Someone has prayed in front of these figures, cared for them, inherited them, or placed meaning upon them, while someone else sees something portable that can be taken and sold. Lali occupies an uncomfortable space between those perspectives because death has made questions of value suddenly personal.<\/p>\n

SANTS never needs to settle whether Lali believes in anything the figures represent. Faith is more interesting here as something surrounding her than something the story needs to diagnose. She lives among objects supposedly connected to transcendence. At the same time, being forced to confront the physical deterioration of someone she loves, and that friction is stronger without an easy spiritual awakening waiting at the end.<\/p>\n

The criminal group also broadens the movie beyond Lali's private grief. These aren't glamorous thieves cracking elaborate security systems in search of priceless museum treasures, and treating the stolen objects as part of an underground economy keeps everything closer to Lali's own precarious existence. People assign enormous emotional value to these figures, while those who take them care more about what they'll bring once they're converted into money.<\/p>\n

That setup offers an unusual amount of humor and absurdity, even though SANTS remains firmly rooted in drama. Stealing saints is inherently strange, and Gurrea allows that strangeness to exist without turning the film into a dark comedy. Those lighter edges help because 103 uninterrupted minutes of grief and desperation could easily become oppressive.<\/p>\n

Julián Elizalde's cinematography also gives Barcelona and the surrounding religious spaces personality without reducing them to postcard imagery. This is a lived-in environment rather than a tourist's version of the city, which fits Gurrea's earlier interest in grounding stories within specific communities. He first discussed SANTS years ago as something rooted in Barcelona's Sants neighborhood and hoped to mix professional performers with people who genuinely belonged there.<\/p>\n

That attention to place helps the crime feel less abstract. Churches, cemeteries, homes, and streets aren't simply backdrops for Lali's emotional journey; they're spaces shaped by different relationships to history and death. Removing a religious figure from one of them becomes more unsettling when the location itself feels inhabited rather than merely selected because it looks impressive on camera.<\/p>\n

The film drags slightly when its two halves don't push against each other strongly enough. Lali's relationship with her mother carries immediate emotional stakes, while the stolen-artifact material takes longer to establish why it deserves comparable attention. At times I found myself wanting the story to return home because that's where the most complicated feelings were waiting.<\/p>\n

Eventually, though, that separation begins to make sense. Lali wants somewhere else to be, something else to solve, and people whose problems aren't measured against a terminal diagnosis. The crime story can feel like an escape from the mother-daughter story because, for Lali, that's part of its attraction.<\/p>\n

Eulàlia Ramón adds another layer to a film already populated by women whose relationships with survival take different forms. SANTS doesn't need to make each of them an explicit counterpoint to Lali. Still, the female relationships help prevent the story from becoming an examination of one woman's interior state. Different ideas about responsibility, opportunity, loyalty, and what people owe one another move beneath the plot.<\/p>\n

What I appreciated most is that Gurrea doesn't turn Lali's desperation into an excuse for everything she does. Understanding why someone makes a bad decision isn't the same as declaring the decision good, and SANTS leaves room for that distinction. Economic instability, grief, and fear explain plenty without removing personal responsibility.<\/p>\n

That's where the crime material finally earns its place. A weaker version of this story would use theft to make Lali seem adventurous during the darkest period of her life, offering temporary liberation before bringing her safely back to the emotional lesson she was supposed to learn. Gurrea is less interested in that kind of clean transformation.<\/p>\n

Grief doesn't automatically improve people. Sometimes it makes them more generous, sometimes more selfish, and sometimes simply too exhausted to behave like whatever version of themselves everyone else expects. SANTS lets Lali stay contradictory enough that losing her mother doesn't suddenly turn her into an inspirational figure.<\/p>\n

The title becomes increasingly interesting for that reason. The saints being stolen have been shaped into fixed images, preserved in poses that suggest certainty, devotion, and permanence. The people moving around them have none of those qualities, and Lali in particular seems incapable of remaining still long enough to become anything so easily defined.<\/p>\n

Mikel Gurrea has made a movie about death that spends a surprising amount of time examining value. What is a religious object worth after it's removed from the person who believes in it? What does money mean when someone you love is running out of time, and what exactly are you supposed to preserve when preservation itself is impossible?<\/p>\n

SANTS occasionally presses those ideas together a little harder than necessary, and its 103 minutes could stand to lose some weight in the stretches where the emotional and criminal threads aren't equally compelling. Yet Victoria Luengo gives the film a center rough enough to resist easy sentiment. At the same time, Gurrea finds an unusual way into familiar territory about grief, family, and the desperate things people do when they're terrified of standing still.<\/p>\n

The thefts may be the part of SANTS that makes the synopsis memorable, but they aren't ultimately what stays with me. Lali attempts to remain in motion while death forces her to stop and look at something she can't steal back, bargain away, or escape forever, which gives the film its real weight.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of KINO PRODUZIONI, LASTOR MEDIA, NOCTURNA PICTURES, VILAÜT FILMS]<\/em><\/p>\n

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MOVIE REVIEWS Sants  –      Genre: Drama, Crime Year Released: 2026 Runtime: 1h 43m Director: Mikel Gurrea Writer(s): Mikel Gurrea, Fran Kosterlitz Cast: Victoria Luengo, Ariadna Gil, Eulàlia Ramón, Cosimo Fusco Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 San Sebastián International Film Festival RAVING REVIEW: A statue of a saint can represent faith, memory, beauty, history, money, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/img\/0367\/0367746.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film-festival"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t