MUBI

I thought the story forgettable enough, but the long enduring shots and sounds of the swimmer in the river caught that wonderful balance between the seeming effortlessness of an athlete through water and that desperate, almost uncontrollable exertion that struggles and gasps at the heart of his rhythmically working limbs. The setting was fantastic, and for me accentuated the uselessness of Goyo’s return to the river from the dusty dry-bone rocks of the first scenes. The eerie calm of the water, which way to go?, and above all the impending and inevitable failure of an old-hack has-been who believes his only shot at redemption to be an impossible one. Occasionally emotive though some scenes proved to be, I thought that the acting missed some of the gloss that would otherwise have merited in this hard task master a half-star en plus.