Apropos of its title, the film attempts to move between two worlds-the visible and the invisible-and makes an earnest, if slightly unconvincing, effort to guide the audience through them.
Gloria, an eight-year-old, shuttles through the hospital where her mother works and has fashioned a kind of family out of the patients admitted there, running along and listening to their stories. Yet she also carries a scar within herself, both metaphorical and literal.
Sofia enters with a markedly different presence. While Gloria remains open and relatively uninhibited in her actions, Sofia speaks to her with a childlike yet distinctly adult brazenness.
The film draws a central line through the Catholic experience of the world in rural Chile and, in doing so, attempts to underscore the existence of an invisible realm-one that belongs particularly to Sofia, and to the person she once was. Who, then, is the boy who resembles her in the photograph?
Built heavily on metaphor-ranging from South American Catholic practices to the recurring image of a small pig-the film layers its symbols deliberately.
For all its ideas concerning faith, there is one particular scene-a conversation between the two single mothers-that, for me, serves as the precursor to everything that follows
“I feel you only see what you want to see.”Antonia to Simone