Spain’s Rodrigo Sorogoyen has proven himself a master of the psychological thriller, whether the serial-killer kind (May God Save Us, 2016) the political kind (The Realm, 2018) or the true-crime kind (The Beasts, 2023). The Beloved, his first film in Competition at Cannes, is an incredible achievement that builds on all those films and leaves them standing in the dust, hitting all the same tense throat-clenching beats but somehow transcending genre altogether. Javier Bardem’s career has been building up to this stunning moment, and his character, Esteban Martinez, makes the self-centered film director of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value look like Walt Disney by comparison.

The first 20 minutes alone are a masterclass; Esteban takes his seat in a fancy restaurant and orders sparkling water with ice and lemon. Right there, you have his character; Esteban is a recovering alcoholic driven to self-destruction by his volatile temperament and exacting needs as a film director. But we don’t know this yet; it is about to be teased out by the woman he is dining with, someone he hasn’t seen for 13 years and clearly feels bad about leaving. She could be his mistress, since he talks of leaving Spain and starting a new life in New York. She is, however, his daughter; Esteban is a feared and lauded film director who wants to cast her in his latest project, a period drama set in the western Sahara desert.

This is how we meet Emilia Vera (Victoria Luengo), the product of an affair with one of Esteban’s leading ladies, and a strikingly mysterious actress who looks so much like an Almodóvar starlet that it should come as no surprise to learn she already is one. The scene is one of two extended moments that encapsulate the film in two very different movements, and as an opening salvo it is an impressive and almost unbearably awkward back and forth that only becomes more uncomfortable as it goes on — the camera pushes in close and closer as the gloves start to come off, and Emilia lets rip about the time her druggy, violent, estranged father once showed her up at a screening of Kill Bill 2.

Nevertheless, Emilia listens to Esteban’s apparently sincere compliments, about the crummy TV show she’s too good for, joining the all-star international cast in Fuerteventura where she is immediately feels out of her depth. Her first scene, a complicated tracking shot, is ruined when she mistimes her delivery, but Esteban — surprisingly — lets her off the hook, blaming a technical issue and giving her leeway to improvise. The other actors can’t help but quiz her on her famous father, winner of a Best Foreign Film Oscar, while the press ask Esteban much more cynical questions about his reasons for casting her in the first place.

Esteban’s motivation, like the real meaning of the title itself (“The Loved One” in Spanish), is opaque, and unlike many of Sorogoyen’s previous films — which would be nothing without a hefty chunk of moral ambiguity — there is very little in the way of closure. If Esteban wants to do right by Emilia, he’s not very good at that, giving her a self-righteous mini lecture about her incipient alcoholism (“Drinking is f*cking shit,” he thunders). It seems more likely that Esteban wants to exert some kind of control over her, which comes out in the second major sequence, a Kubrickian scene of behind-the-camera peacockery that sees Esteban finally lose his cool, revealing frightening wells of anger that cause the female cinematographer to pack up and go, costing the film two days of shooting.

Amazingly, it is not Emilia that leaves, and the film invites us to ponder on that. It also feeds us questions about the paradox of filmmaking, in which relationships are so often destroyed in the process of creation — Esteban wants truth and authenticity every time, and yet he is constantly retconning his past, pushing away his daughter when she pushes back on his version of their history. By the end there is a clear feeling that Esteban’s art is his real beloved, and Sorogoyen gives us a sense of that with his use of screen ratios and film stock, from classic black-and-white to shimmering color and grainy video-assist: Esteban always has the scene in his head (and Sorogoyen’s Godardian use of score underlines that).

Certainly one of the best films about filmmaking since François Truffaut’s Day for Night, The Beloved may be the scariest since Peeping Tom. Unwittingly, Esteban makes this observation himself when he quotes Ingmar Bergman’s muse Liv Ullmann in defense of his perfectionist, naturalist style: “The closer the camera, the more the mask must slip,” he tells Emilia. Which is great advice from one actor to another, but closer to a Death Row confession coming from a director.

Title: The Beloved
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Cast: Javier Bardem, Victoria Luengo, Melina Matthews, Marina Fois, Malena Villa
Sales: Goodfellas
Running time: 2 hrs 15 mins