Twelve Moons: When Structure Crumbles
This outstanding debut feature conveys a story that oscillates between the clarity of the plausible and the haze of the dreamlike in a stylistic register that balances beauty with disturbance. The camera ventures into the intimate psychic corners of Sofía, an architect in emotional free fall, and does so without concessions, with a fierce lucidity that unsettles and provokes reflection. Director Victoria Franco builds a narrative of subjective drift that challenges, accuses, and shakes the viewer while never losing its visual precision.
The choice of black and white photography is far from ornamental. Its asceticism reflects a will to distill, heightening the contrast between the rational geometry of Sofía’s architectural world and the emotional chaos she inhabits. Each frame feels like a cell, a structure that mirrors both her alienation and the subtle violence that eventually overwhelms her. Franco not only portrays feminine intimacy, but transforms it into a symbolic battlefield where the tensions of classism, structural misogyny, and aporophobia in contemporary societies converge.
The protagonist, portrayed with great commitment by Ana de la Reguera, moves between daily numbness and brief moments of sensory rupture that verge on delirium. Several factors underpin her crisis. First, the impossibility of asserting her voice and vision in a rigid and patriarchal professional environment. Her refusal to bend and to abandon her convictions —something that might even be seen as heroic— is interpreted by others as hysterical impertinence, bordering on madness. Second, her husband tends to exert a paternalistic form of “protection” that erases her individuality, her skills, and her tools for coping with adversity. Another element at play is drug use: Ana begins the story consuming substances recreationally —with occasional excess— which is harshly condemned by her social circle. Yet it is precisely this escalating judgment that drives her toward more problematic drug use.
Motherhood is not portrayed as a personal aspiration for the protagonist, but rather as part of a social mandate to which she appears only tenuously committed. It does not emerge as a source of identity or fulfillment, but instead as another layer of expectation imposed on her body and her time. Franco subtly captures this ambivalence, avoiding overt dramatization, and instead weaves it into the fabric of Sofía’s emotional detachment and sense of dislocation.
Twelve Moons (Doce lunas) is striking not only for its formal beauty, but above all for the rawness of certain scenes that —without voyeurism or excess— confront us with abandonment. In the second half of the film, Ana begins a kind of via crucis, a downward spiral of social decline. Franco’s deep exploration of what for many is the greatest fear —a wealthy person’s fall into poverty or even destitution— is remarkable. She reveals a scenario that is not only possible but far more common than we like to think, in which vulnerability increases exponentially. Among other things, this section of the film makes clear how a woman in crisis can lose all forms of protection and privilege. Franco precisely targets systems that present themselves as “care” —psychiatry, family, work— to expose their fractures and embedded violence. Far from generating a moralizing discourse, the director opts for a form of implicit denunciation, where impact stems not from what is visible, but from absence, off-screen space, and the echo left by each image.
It is in this ability to provoke deep reflection that the film truly soars, not only regarding mental health as an individual affliction, but as a social and institutional construct that regulates, excludes, and normalizes. Twelve Moons is a film that observes, that withdraws at the right moment, that demands. And in these gestures, in the film’s refusal to underline or soften, lies its political and aesthetic power.
By Diego Faraone
Edited by José Teodoro
@FIPRESCI 2025