Javier Bardem gives his scariest performance since No Country For Old Men in this disquieting new film about emotional abuse from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, who made 2023 rural noir shocker The Beasts.

It’s a film about a film-shoot – often the occasion for whimsy or sentimentality or woozy rapture about the magic of cinema. Not here. And given this and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, this year could be the Cannes of father-daughter dysfunction.

Bardem plays Esteban, a movie director and celebrated Oscar and Cannes Palme winner: a charming and worldly man who, in the film’s increasingly disturbing sequence, reveals himself to be at the moment of opaque midlife crisis.

He is married with two children but has chosen to make contact with his grownup daughter from an earlier relationship, having been out of touch for many years: the child of the co-star of his debut movie who (tellingly) quit acting right after that.

This is Emilia, shrewdly and intelligently played by Victoria Luengo, who is an actor herself. Esteban schedules a lunch to offer Emilia the lead in his new 1930s-set movie about Spain’s colonial exploitation of western Sahara.

Sorogoyen, Bardem and Luengo show us what a tense meeting it is: Esteban is not drinking these days, but Emilia orders a beer and a red wine. Esteban blandly assures her there is nothing nepo in the job offer and beamingly wonders if they might go to the movies together as they did when she was younger. Emilia promptly kills his good mood by angrily reminding her dad of their trip to see Kill Bill: Volume 2 when she was 12 and he showed up drunk and high and made a scene that emotionally scarredher for life.

Furiously, Esteban says she has misremembered and misinterpreted this event; his gaslighting doesn’t cancel the job offer, though he warns he might be “tough” on her during filming. The scene is set for a film shoot of pure abusive cruelty, in ironic contrast to his project’s supposed high-minded criticism of colonial patriarchal power relations.

Esteban is coercive and controlling, qualities all the scarier for coexisting with his honed professional charm: he is quietly furious and resentful of the way Emilia chooses to hang out with other crew members (but not him) after a day’s filming. He patronisingly gives her personal advice, including a finger-wagging instruction to quit drinking, which Emilia angrily rejects as unbearable hypocritical posturing, causing Esteban to icily treat her like an ungrateful brat.

And this toxic situation culminates in an almost unwatchable sequence in which Esteban has a violent meltdown at this cast’s failure to get a certain scene right, despite take after take in the burning sun.

It is a fierce rejection of anything starry-eyed about movie-making and a quietly gripping psychological study of a painful confrontation between father and daughter. Has Emilia accepted this role, despite her obvious reservations, simply to confront her dad once and for all, to force him to a psychological crisis in which he will accept his guilt for the way he behaved?

Maybe. But the film asks you to consider the further possibility: that Esteban has devised this entire movie to subdue his daughter, to make her be grateful to him, to submit to him, make her forgive and even forget the way he treated Emilia and her mother.

It is a frightening idea, conveyed with passion by Javier Bardem and Emilia Luengo: two outstanding performances.