At Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona in 2024, nestled alongside the likes of Pulp and Charli xcx was an unusual addition to the bill. Stella Maris arrived on stage as haunting home movies, religious iconography and glittery gifs popped up on the screen behind them. Part-Haim, part-Heaven’s Gate, the six sisters performed their hits: “Christian electronic dance music” that their late mother, apparently, believed would help them to save the world.
The performance was very real, but the band was not. It was a stunt for the Spanish TV mega-hit La Mesías or The Messiah, which was released there in 2023. Its seven episodes centre on an estranged brother and sister, Enric and Irene, who discover that their siblings have become a viral pop band.
Cue a soft-focus, flashback-heavy trip into the family’s past, thick with emotional neglect, parental narcissism and religious fanaticism. Oh, and there are UFOs, too. La Mesías is nothing if not singular in its vision, and was masterminded by Los Javis, the Spanish duo who won best director at Cannes film festival earlier this year for their upcoming queer drama film La Bola Negra.
Certainly, this isn’t a series you will forget in a hurry. As well as being incredibly long (some episodes clock in at close to an hour and 20 minutes, making it less of an outlier on the usually cinema-focused streamer Mubi), it is – and I mean this lovingly – truly bizarre. Sometimes, it feels like two or three different series have been smooshed together, with timelines that jostle for your attention.
There are the early years, with a young Enric and Irene played with poise and maturity by child actors Bruno Núñez Arjona and Carla Moral, plus Ana Rujas as Montserrat – part Cher in Mermaids, part Mommie Dearest who drunkenly tells her kids that “mamá tiene que vivir” (“mum needs a life, too”). Then there are the sheltered adolescent years, with the siblings now played by Biel Rossell and Irene Balmes and known by the names Isaías and Resurrección. They’re coerced by their mother into performing religious music in the 90s, while wearing clothes that look as if they’re from the 1920s.
Finally, we have Enric and Irene in the present (Roger Casamajor and Macarena García), traumatised by their childhood but also determined to save their younger sisters. If this wasn’t already clear, it is a rather ambitious feat. And if you thought Pedro Almodóvar had a lot to say about mothers, then just wait to see what Los Javis have in store here as Montserrat (also played by Lola Dueñas and Carmen Machi) inflicts all of her own psychic chaos and religious mania on to her children.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
